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Twende-twende: a mobile application for traffic congestion awareness and routing

Published: 02 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

According to the UN-HABITAT, the city of Nairobi loses half a million USD daily due to congestion on roads designed for a city 10 times smaller. Therefore, there is a great need for traffic management and awareness solutions. Many existing solutions are unsuitable for cities like Nairobi due to economic constraints, dynamic events, uncertainty, and poor infrastructure.
Recently, a novel approach called Frugal Innovation has been adopted at IBM Tokyo Research. The approach combines very low quality images (VLQI) captured by existing low-cost cameras with network flow algorithms to accurately estimate traffic flow. We extend their work to develop a mobile app, called Twende-Twende, that provides drivers with real-time traffic information and suggested routes. We incorporate locally relevant context (such as references to landmarks) to predict congestion and create traffic awareness. We deployed the app and evaluated its effectiveness, accuracy and usability. Our initial evaluation indicates that the app enhances the driving experience and can be deployed in other developing countries.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MOBILESoft 2014: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems
    June 2014
    108 pages
    ISBN:9781450328784
    DOI:10.1145/2593902
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 02 June 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. Frugal Innovation
    2. Land Marking
    3. Mobile Application
    4. Traffic Congestion

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    View all
    • (2024)Factors Influencing Travelers and Motorists Acceptance of Intelligent Transportation Applications: A SEM-ANN Approach2024 9th International Conference on Business and Industrial Research (ICBIR)10.1109/ICBIR61386.2024.10875741(1500-1505)Online publication date: 23-May-2024
    • (2022)MARRS: A Framework for multi-objective risk-aware route recommendation using Multitask-TransformerProceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/3523227.3546787(360-368)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2022
    • (2019)Smart Cities in Sub-Saharan AfricaIndustrial and Urban Growth Policies at the Sub-National, National, and Global Levels10.4018/978-1-5225-7625-9.ch005(83-99)Online publication date: 2019
    • (2017)City-Wide Traffic Flow Estimation From a Limited Number of Low-Quality CamerasIEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems10.1109/TITS.2016.259716018:4(950-959)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2017
    • (2017)Roaming Nairobi roadsProceedings of the 4th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems10.1109/MOBILESoft.2017.8(100-109)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
    • (2014)A dynamic path planning algorithm for multi-core navigation device2014 International Conference on Smart Computing Workshops10.1109/SMARTCOMP-W.2014.7046669(65-70)Online publication date: Nov-2014
    • (2014)Towards a frugal framework for monitoring road quality17th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC)10.1109/ITSC.2014.6958175(3022-3027)Online publication date: Oct-2014

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