iSCIENCE: Using smartphones for science

iSCIENCE_illustration_bannerOur group was won a grant from the Academy of Finland to work on the iSCIENCE project during 2015-2018. The funding will enable us to further develop our AWARE smartphone platform. The platform enables scientists to capture, analyse, and share smartphone sensor data.

The platform is scalable with plugins installable directly on smartphones in an ad-hoc fashion.  AWARE can be used as a standalone mobile logging tool. This means that the data is stored locally on a device’s storage and it is not shared with remote devices or servers. This is ideal for small-scale and laboratory deployments, where researchers or users just want to collect data without having to write a single line of code.  However, the tool can also send the data to a server, where a dashboard is used to manage the study and visualise data.

main-client-uiIn addition to sensor values, AWARE has a built-in Questionnaire mechanism that allows researchers and users to provide explicit responses on their mobile devices.

There are three categories of use that AWARE supports.

  • Personal use: No programming skills are required. A server dashboard allows users to enable or disable context information, for each sensor individually. The data is saved locally on the mobile phone. Privacy is enforced by design, so AWARE does not log personal information, such as phone numbers or contacts information. One can additionally install plugins that will further enhance the capabilities of the device, built-in with the AWARE Client.
  • Researchers: AWARE makes it easy to run an experiment or study with smartphones.  Install the AWARE Client on the participants phone, select the data you want to collect, and watch the data arrive on the server.
  • Application Developers:  AWARE provides application developers with user’s context, available as event-based triggers. AWARE is also available as an Android library, where context is inherently shared on the operating system level, thus empowering richer context-aware applications for the end-users.

Publications

[bibtex key=Ferreira:FrontiersInIct:2015]

Software

Links