Keywords

1 Introduction

Environmental issues are increasingly gaining concern; any changes in the environment are likely to affect all living things, directly or indirectly [1, 2]. The growth of the population in the last years has put high demands on many of the environmental natural resources [3], which has led to many forms of pollution and environmental violations by people, intentionally or otherwise. Therefore, environmental protection becomes necessary [4] and specialized voluntary groups, environmental organizations and environmental software are emerging to address this need.

Environmental software applications are developed especially for environmental protection [5]. They offer resources and services that reduce environmental damage, increase protection acts, and raise awareness [6].

Nowadays, many people tend to use smartphone instead of PCs, which raises the importance of mobile applications. The number of active mobile phones will reach 7.3 billion by 2014. In other words, right now there are more active cell phones than there are people on the planet [7]. Therefore, the need for mobile environmental software is an important step forward to help minimize environmental damage.

This paper aims at increasing peoples’ awareness and concern about the environment through developing an environmental mobile application that allows citizens to help their government make their cities better places. It helps the responsible agencies to have easy and quick access to notifications, provided by the community about environmental issues, so they can address and prioritize them appropriately.

Although the application can be adopted by any city, Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, was chosen to start with. Riyadh suffers from many environmental problems such as vandalism, cars left in street for a long time, dead animals on the sides of streets and a lot more. The suggested mobile application, loveRiyadh, has the potential to increase Riyadh population’s awareness about the danger of neglecting the environment and make the city of Riyadh clean, healthy and safe for the coming generations. The software has been developed and tested successfully and the preliminary evaluation results of the usability test of the software are encouraging.

2 Related Work

By searching the mobile applications market for related systems running on iOS, Android devices or both, three environmental software were found: Love Clean London (LCL) [8], myEnv [9] and Baladiya [10]. In Table 1, the main features of each application are listed and compared with loveRiyadh.

Table 1. Comparison between environmental mobile applications
Full size table

2.1 Love Clean London

Love Clean London (LCL) [8] is a mobile reporting tool. It is a cloud-based mobile application to report “grim crime” such as litter, potholes, graffiti, broken paving slabs, abandoned vehicles, footway and footpath defects, blocked street drains/gullies etc. The goal is to help people to report environmental crimes and keep the London boroughs clean and healthy. Figure 1 shows screen shots from Love Clean London application.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Love clean London application

Full size image

2.2 MyENV

My Environment (myENV) [9] application is an iPhone and Android application developed by National Environment Agency (NEA) in Singapore. This application provides useful information on the environment to the people of Singapore. This information is already available on NEAs corporate website, but the agency wanted to make it easier for users to reach important information so they can make right environmental everyday choices. Figure 2 screenshots from myENV application.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

myENV application

Full size image

2.3 Baladiya

Baladiya [9] is a mobile application developed by Ministry Of Municipality and Urban Planning, Doha, Qatar. The application runs on iPhone or android devices, and provides several services to give Qatar citizens better and easier ways to communicate with the ministry. Figure 3 screenshots from Baladiya application.

Fig. 3.
figure 3

Baladiya application

Full size image

3 System Design

LoveRiyadh application was developed to allow volunteers to help prevent some environmental violence, such as cars left in the street for a long time, dead animals on the sides of streets and overloaded litter bins. It also allows volunteers to report issues related to streets or districts that need to be cleaned or maintained in terms of lighting or pavements and other aspects of environmental pollution, such as car exhaust, factory smoke and water swamps.

The application acts as messaging service between volunteers and Riyadh Council. It allows volunteers to send a picture and a message (report) describing the case of the environmental hazard, showing the location of the case as a map attached to the message to the council. On receiving a message, the council responds appropriate and updates the report status so each volunteer can track the progress of his/her report(s), as shown in Fig. 4.

Fig. 4.
figure 4

Workflow of Love Riyadh application

Full size image

loveRiyadh software system is composed of a mobile application linked to a mobile database and a web-based database. The latter is connected through a web service to a server from one end and an administrator interface from the other end to help the staff in their administrative work, as shown in Fig. 5.

Fig. 5.
figure 5

LoveRiyadh system architecture

Full size image

4 Implementation

The mobile application is implemented for Android devices using Eclipse IDE, Android Emulator and Android platform. The web database is implemented using MS SQL server 2008 and Visual studio 2010 is placed on a web server that requires authorized access and contains report information (date, current status, category name, sender information) and users’ accounts. The mobile database is implemented using SQLite to store all drafts and sent reports. The web service is developed using visual studio 2010 to connect the mobile application to the web server.

The user interface is encoded in the Arabic language at this stage, although it is intended to support English in a future version. The first screen is the Logo Screen, shown in Fig. 6, which leads directly to the Sign in screen, shown in Fig. 7. From this screen, the user can sign in, go to the Sign up screen or exit the application.

Fig. 6.
figure 6

Logo screen

Full size image
Fig. 7.
figure 7

Sign in screen

Full size image

In the Sign in screen, there are two fields: one for the username, which is the user ID and the other for the password. On clicking the sign in button, the application sends the data to the web database to verify user data and a message would be displayed accordingly. The Sign up screen includes four fields, as shown in Fig. 8: a username field, which is unique, so it can be used as a user ID, a password field for secure log in and e-mail and phone number fields to contact the user. After signing in successfully, the Home screen is displayed, as shown in Fig. 9. It contains six buttons: send report, saved reports, sent reports, all reports, profile and logout with each button leading to a different screen.

Fig. 8.
figure 8

Sign up screen

Full size image
Fig. 9.
figure 9

Home screen

Full size image

The Send Report screen contains a field for typing a description of the problem, a list of hazard categories to select from, a camera icon to take a picture or upload a from gallery and a location flag to indicate that the current location of the user will be automatically sent with the report, as shown in Fig. 10. There are also two buttons, one for sending the report and the other for saving the report. The Saved Reports screen presents a list of saved reports (drafts) which have not been sent yet, as shown in Fig. 11, while the Sent Reports screen displays a list of already completed and sent reports, as shown in Fig. 12.

Fig. 10.
figure 10

Send report screens

Full size image
Fig. 11.
figure 11

Saved report screen

Full size image
Fig. 12.
figure 12

Sent report screen

Full size image

The All Reports screen, shown in Fig. 13, has two options: one is the live map option that displays all reports that have been sent by users for this specific location on the map, the other is the list of reports option, which displays a list of all reports that have been sent by all users.

Fig. 13.
figure 13

All reports screen

Full size image

5 Evaluation and Testing

For testing LoveRiyadh application, we developed a multi-level plan that starts by testing each unit separately. Then when the whole system is completed, we test the correct integration between units. Finally, we test the functionality of the entire system. After that, we carry out the usability testing by a questionnaire to insure that the application meets the end user’s expectations.

The work in unit testing considers each interface page in LoveRiyadh application as a unit. So testing main functions for each unit was done separately, which is important in the incremental approach that followed in the software development. This test also verified that the mobile and web database are functioning as desired.

In Integration testing, we verified that all pages have correctly working links. Also, that the application is connected to the external and internal databases and able to communicate with them. After that, the entire system was tested and results were verified.

For usability testing, we developed a brief Arabic/English questionnaire to get the impression of real end users about the application. After receiving the feedback, we analyzed the results and modified the application accordingly.

6 Conclusion

Due to rapid technological development and population growth, Riyadh is a city that experiences many environmental problems. The objective of this paper was to develop a mobile application that helps in preventing environmental hazards. It provides citizens with an easy and efficient way to do their part in cleaning up their city and making it a more comfortable and safe place. In addition, it lets responsible people know about the problems and start solving them immediately.

The current version of the LoveRiyadh mobile application supports many reporting functionalities. However, it is to be further improved in the near future to support SMS notifications, other mobile platforms and an English interface. It is also planned to generalize the application for other cities in Saudi Arabia, as well as other countries.