open cell ID - open signal map - singapore

andrew_g

Member
Joined
Oct 12, 2007
Messages
134
Reaction score
0
hi there, thanks for reading this thread.

i've been wanting to create a cell tower based location system to help families track elderly with dementia who is lost (these often become an emergency for the families as the elderly can't find their way home) or for parents to monitor / track young children (who may perhaps be lost or is wandering outside)

this used to be easy with google latitude. However, that has been retired
https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3001634?hl=en

today it is all various 3rd party apps and services that's filling this gap.

the key to this comprise various pieces
1) a cell tower signal map database that has cell towers (cell IDs and signal strength etc) and gps location that's measured
2) location apps that can use the signal map database (a rather old but rather famous project is placelab
Intel Labs Seattle | Research
Place Lab | SourceForge.net)
3) a server based service which could allow the location info to be shared in a group of people (this is quite similar to instant messaging / jabber / xmpp)

1 of a key piece is the cell tower signal map item (1),

Today this piece of information has been crowd sourced into a well known, popular project web
OpenCellID - *OpenCellID
Cell tower signal map heat map

if you zoom in you would see that various areas e.g. NTU campus, various places in Tuas / Jurong / Boon lay as well as NUS campus, Singapore, Ngee Ann poly as well as the Science park / pasir panjang as well as many areas in Singapore that's rather underrepresented (rather sparse empty).

If you download or query on the databases / statistics, you may also notice that perhaps some telcos(m1,starhub,singtel?) may be undrerepresented.
you could help to beef up this public database using various apps that runs on android
e.g.
tower collector
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.zamojski.soft.towercollector&hl=en
(if you use a snapdragon based device e.g. many Samsung / Sony etc phones, you may like to turn on the screen dimmed option. otherwise it may result in errors that's tracked and uploaded. some of the snapdragon phones/devices has a nasty bug in that the cell id stop changing when the screen turns off, this would result in the cell id measured being.totally off-location)
or
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.enaikoon.android.inviu.opencellid&hl=en

---
apps / services: some researchers or anyone for that matter may like to create apps which use this crowd sourced cell tower signal map.
you may draw inspiration from the placelab project
Intel Labs Seattle | Research
Place Lab | SourceForge.net)

note that this is very similar to Google Map's 'Coarse Location' that use cell towers to estimate a rough (not very accurate but nevertheless useful) location. But today this full signal map can be stored on the phone / device itself without connecting and using data. it save data costs and very importantly extend battery life. And better still you could create apps that may outdo Google's coarse location

hope that this may evolve into an apps ecosystem for users needing this important and perhaps rather 'modern' functionality, cell tower locations systems.

thanks and cheers,
 
Last edited:
Important Forum Advisory Note
This forum is moderated by volunteer moderators who will react only to members' feedback on posts. Moderators are not employees or representatives of HWZ. Forum members and moderators are responsible for their own posts.

Please refer to our Community Guidelines and Standards, Terms of Service and Member T&Cs for more information.
Top