2.2 A Paradigm Shift in Data Acquisition

The advantages of mobile phones as DePIN nodes overturn traditional solutions in multiple dimensions:

Cost-effectiveness breakthrough

• Use existing equipment to make marginal costs approach zero

• The crowdsourcing model distributes equipment depreciation to a large number of users

• Distributed architecture eliminates centralized operation and maintenance costs

Data quality has improved

• Multi-sensor spatiotemporal synchronization accuracy reaches nanosecond level

• Automatic annotation of environmental context information (location, weather, biorhythm, etc.)

• continuous sampling frequency exceeds 1000Hz (traditional equipment is usually 200Hz)

Compared with traditional AI data acquisition methods, mobile phones have significant advantages as DePIN nodes:

Dimensions	Dedicated hardware solution	Mobile DePIN solution	Efficiency improvement
Device cost	$500−$2000/unit	$0-$1000 (0 if using existing equipment)	100
Deployment density	10-100 units/km²	1000-5000 units/km²	100
Data diversity	Single scene structured data	Cross-scene multimodal data flow	83
Real-time feedback capability	Delay > 500ms	Delay < 50ms	90

Typical cases:

3D reconstruction: Using mobile phone camera arrays to collect multi-view images and generate high-precision models through NeRF technology, the cost is reduced by 92% compared to industrial-grade scanners (NVIDIA Omniverse measured data) Behavior analysis: The continuous sampling frequency of the accelerometer/gyroscope reaches 1000Hz, which can capture micro-expressions (facial muscle displacement <0.5mm) and gesture intentions (recognition accuracy 99.7%)