This thesis aims at designing and prototyping a crowd-sensing application for outdoor air quality monitoring through portable sensors that can be used by people for  tracking and locating their personal objects (e.g. bags and packs) or means of transportation (e.g. bicycles and motorcycles) and at the same time contributing to build a real-time pollution map while moving through a city. The application will combine value-added services for the single user (e.g. a bicycle anti-theft alarm system) with air quality collaborative sensing features, and particular emphasis will be placed on the design of appropriate incentives and gamification features to increase user engagement in the crowd-sensing process.

The objectives of this thesis work are the design and prototyping of both the hardware and software components of such a system. The portable module for outdoor tracking and air quality sensing will be implemented on the Arduino open hardware platform, while software modules will include both the development of an Android application and the integration of some cloud server components needed to collect and elaborate sensors data (e.g. Thingspeak).