2. Problem Background
Rickshaw Drivers Economic Situation:
• In cities across South Asia, due to absence of adequate mass
transport systems the ubiquitous rickshaw dominates traffic tangled streets.
But Rickshaw/Taxi drivers in Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Egypt
and other developing countries are extremely poor and most of them
live below the poverty line.
• Following statistics will add more numbers to this:
– "Taxi drivers are among the 55% of the population living under the
poverty line of $2 a day," reported in a *CNN article (Egypt).
– Similar is the story of Indian Drivers who earns approx. $4 a day.
Real Time Traffic update problem in developing countries:
• In developed countries the Traffic data is collected using modern fiber-optic
cables embedded in the pavement to sensor boxes along the roads and
through the data send by other workers of the Traffic information gathering
company.
• But such high tech sensor systems require high installation and maintenance
costs and are not available on roads of developing countries and thus to
determine real time traffic is a challenge.
3. Solution
• The idea - 'RealTime Traffic for GPS navigators', is a solution to both
the above problems. It targets this section of BOP as micro workers,
to uplift their living and at same time give real time traffic updates
to GPS navigation systems like Nokia Maps, Garmin, Mio, Navigon,
TomTom, etc. in developing countries.
• In the proposed solution, rickshaw drivers will act as the real time traffic
data source. They cover all most all roads and areas, and are on
continuous move from day to night. So they don’t have to do any special
activity for sending the traffic status of a given area, just need to spend
a couple of minutes to send traffic data manually or using
automatic traffic data collector as explained below, to MicroWork
Employer and will earn for the updates.
4. Microworkers
Business Model Conventional Methods
Pneumatic road tube
Piezoelectric sensors
Magnetic loops
Microwave radar
Video image detection
MicroWork Employer
Semi-Automatic
Mode
Conventional
Data Processor
Client
Final
Traffic
Update
MicroWork
Output
Processor
5. Business Model
Business Entities:
• Client - GPS navigator product companies
• MicroWork Employer – One who gathers all traffic data and processes it and send it to
clients
• MicroWorker – Rickshaw/Taxi Drivers
Process:
1. Client will subscribe to MicroWork Employer for traffic updates.
2. MicroWork Employer will choose the number of microworkers required in each area for
traffic monitoring and will get required data from them in one of the following 3 ways:
A. Manual:
• Whenever Driver stops due car due to traffic, traffic signal or after dropping the
passenger to destiny, he can simply text (sms) following 3 key data sets to
Employer:
– Area Name
– Road Name
– Traffic Status (Low/Medium/High)
• Example: Dadar, Ambedkar Road, High [Delimeter(e.g comma,slash) will be fixed
for sms so that automatic processing can be done at employer end]
• Payment: $0.10 per verified update (verification will be based on the similar
status for a given road and area from other microworker).
6. Business Model (contd.)
B. Semi-Automatic:
• In case the driver phone is equipped with GPS, an application will be installed on
the driver’s phone. On click of the application it will automatically retrieve the area
& road name. Driver just needs to specify the traffic status (Low/Medium/High)
from the predefined dropdown box. Whenever Driver stops due car due to
traffic, traffic signal or after dropping the passenger to destiny, the traffic update
can be send to MicroWork Employer.
• In case if driver thinks that GPS is not able to do the job correct, manual override
functionality should be provided.
• Payment: $0.15 per verified update (Additional incentive for using GSP mobiles
which will provide partial automatic data entry and thus more accurate results.)
C. Fully Automatic:
• *Mobile Century, ‘Field experiment’ performed a demonstration on February
8, 2008 to prove the feasibility of a prototype location-based service: real-time
traffic estimation using GPS data from cellular phones only. Fully Automatic mode
can be build using the same technique called virtual trip lines (VTLs), which uses
position and speed update from the mobile device for estimating the traffic status.
In this mode the encryption of data can give additional advantage of user privacy.
User don’t need to do any manual intervention, just keep the application running
throughout and the traffic data will be send to MicroWork Employer system
automatically.
• Payment: Payment: $1 for application running for 6 hours per day.
7. Business Model (contd.)
3. The final accuracy of the traffic data will be calculated by MicroWork
Employer system automatically and it will be based on combination of all the
three modes.(similar results from many microworkers for a given area and
road will be considered as accurate result).
4. Once the traffic output calculation is done the data will be immediately
send to clients.
5. Client will be charged based on the area required to monitor and the
frequency in which the update is required. Typically a time based contract can
be done.
8. Novelty
• First of its kind, realtime traffic update for GPS navigator systems using
mobile technology with the help of rickshaw drivers as microworkers, in
developing countries.
Benefits
• Additional income for the targeted BOP sector (Rickshaw/Taxi Drivers)
from developing countries who are living below poverty line, and thus
will get a chance to improve their economic status with easy to
do/automatic micro job.
• Very easy to do task.
• Leveraging latest mobile technology for automatic traffic updates.
Challenges
• For Semi-Automatic / Fully Automatic Modes, a medium budget phone
will be required which is a challenge for the microworkers to buy. This
problem can be tackled by loaning such phones by MicroEmployer and
taking it back once the contract with microworker is over.
• Although privacy will be a possible issue with the microworker, but
considering the targeted microworkers that will be not much of a problem
for most of them.
