Investigating Factors Leading to Participation in Mobile Crowdsourcing Applications

Abstract

Crowdsourcing (CS) has undergone a new and emerging shift recently – it can now be deployed on smartphones. CS is not a new technology; it has been used for years on websites and GSM mobile phones. However, the use of CS on smartphones allows more and different opportunities for CS technology because it combines a sense of the surrounding environment with crowdsourcing, which has not yet been well studied. There are some challenges in using CS on smartphones, the main one being that a number of projects do not have sufficient participants to share sufficient data, which results in a lack of information. This research explores, empirically, the factors that affect people's use of mobile crowdsourced participatory sensing (CSPS) applications. We used the TobaccoFree application (TFA) (“http://tobaccofree.nzdis.org/”) and NoiseTube Mobile (NTM) (“http://noisetube.net/”) as cases in this study. The factors that were identified are perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU), perceived privacy concerns (PPC) and perceived enjoyment (PE). Results indicate that behavioural intention is mainly correlated with perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment.