The Role of Micromobility in Environmental Monitoring: Reflections and Opportunities on the Use of Pervasive Sensing

Micromobility vehicles are not just friendly transportation options for the environment, but also can aid in protecting it. Currently, obtaining environmental indicators at a city scale is challenging due to limited spatial and temporal coverage in existing solutions. This article contributes a sensor-based micromobility framework for equipping micromobility vehicles with sensors for environmental monitoring. To build this framework, we conduct a literature review on sensor repurposing for environmental monitoring. With this information, we then describe how our framework can facilitate the analysis of sensors embedded in micromobility vehicles. Our framework organizes research challenges based on the range level of the sensors to collect data samples to characterize the surrounding environment, with each level combining multiple modalities, or introducing participatory sensing to improve veracity of the measurements. We then discuss the fundamental issues in data collection that arise at each level and highlight the most feasible applications for environmental monitoring that can be supported by micromobility. We conclude with a summary of core research challenges, opportunities, and a discussion on the implications of using these vehicles.