Sundroid: solar radiation awareness with smartphones

  • Authors:
  • Thomas Fahrni;Michael Kuhn;Philipp Sommer;Roger Wattenhofer;Samuel Welten

  • Affiliations:
  • ETH, Zurich, Switzerland;ETH, Zurich, Switzerland;ETH, Zurich, Switzerland;ETH, Zurich, Switzerland;ETH, Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Ubiquitous computing
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

While the sun is important for our health, overexposure to sunlight carries significant health risks ranging from sunburn to skin cancer. Although people know about these risks, sunlight related skin damages have increased over the past decades. We have conducted a survey that sheds light on this phenomenon and suggests that the missing natural sense for UV radiation negatively influences people's sun related behavior. To address this issue, we have implemented Sundroid. Sundroid measures the incident UV radiation using a body-worn sensing unit that communicates wirelessly with the user's smartphone. The phone thereby acts as a user interface to present the measured data in an intuitive manner, and to notify the user once a critical amount of sunlight has been reached. Sundroid can also be applied in other contexts, such as behavioral research or medicine. We show that after calibration, errors are within 5% compared to a high-precision reference signal.