Survey-based exploration of attitudes to participatory sensing tasks in location-based gaming communities

An increasing number of participatory sensing applications have been developed in recent years. However, most of them are still in the early adoption phase and count only few users as compared to the billions of devices that could be leveraged. On the other side, existing location-based games, such as geocaching or Ingress, gain in popularity and attract up to millions of users worldwide. Since the players of location-based games are already exploring their environment, one approach could be to especially address these communities in order to increase the user base of participatory sensing applications. To this end, we conduct a preliminary questionnaire-based study involving 337 participants to investigate the possible attitudes of such players towards participatory sensing applications. In particular, we analyze the potential interests of our participants in sensing tasks based on their demographics, played games, and sensing modalities. Our results show that our participants would prefer contributing to sensing tasks when integrated in geocaching. Moreover, a point-based reward system would not significantly motivate them and could even have negative consequences.