Participatory sensing: Demographic determinants of incentive effectiveness and a framework for establishing incentive design guidelines

Participatory sensing, in which volunteers use the sensors on their smartphones to capture and transmit digital samples of the surrounding environment, shows promise for large-scale data collection. Recently, researchers have begun to explore the use of incentives to motivate participation in these kinds of data collection campaigns. This study investigates the influence of demographics on the effectiveness of incentives to motivate volunteer data collection in participatory sensing. The hypothesis that age, sex, ethnicity and education have an influence on the effectiveness of incentives to promote volunteer participation in a data collection campaign was evaluated via a large-scale survey of 260 respondents. Findings showed that the demographic of age had an influence on social motivation. These findings were validated in a real-world participatory sensing context, using two user studies. The user studies were conducted using participatory sensing applications developed and deployed in two different domains. The two user studies (a) Foodie Frenzy and (b) Watch it Bloom measured motivation and engagement via a pre-survey and a post survey respectively. Findings from both studies were used in the evaluation of a framework designed to provide a generalized reusable solution for the selection of incentives in the participatory sensing domain. The implication of this research is its potential to close the gap in the process of developing and selecting targeted incentives to motivate and encourage sustained volunteer participation in the field of participatory sensing.