A Survey of Mobile Phone Sensing

Paper Info
Published in September 2010 IEEE Communications Magazine Dartmouth College joint effort between graduate students and professors (Mobile Sensing Group)

Outline
Current Mobile Phone Sensing
Hardware Applications

Sensing Scale and Paradigms Architectural Framework for discussing current issues and challenges

Smartphone Technological Advances

Cheap embedded sensors Open and programmable Each vendor offers an app store Mobile computing cloud for offloading services to backend servers

iPhone 4 - Sensors

Galaxy S4 - Sensors

Applications
Transportation
Traffic conditions (MIT VTrack, Mobile Millennium Project)

Social Networking
Sensing Presence (Dartmouths CenceMe project)

Environmental Monitoring
Measuring pollution (UCLAs PIER Project)

Health and Well Being

Promoting personal fitness (UbiFit Garden)

Application Stores
Multiple vendors
Apple AppStore Android Market Microsoft Mobile Marketplace

Developers
Startups Academia Small Research laboratories Individuals

Critical mass of users

Application Stores
Current issues and challenges
User selection Validation Privacy of users Scaling and data management

Sensing Scale

Sensing Scale
Personal Sensing
Generate data for the sole consumption of the user, not shared

Group Sensing
Individuals who participate in an application that collectively share a common goal, concern, or interest

Community Sensing
Large-scale data collection, analysis, and sharing for the good of the community

Sensing Paradigms
Participatory: user actively engages in the data collection activity
Example: managing garbage cans by taking photos Advantages: supports complex operations Challenges:
Quality of data is dependent on participants

Opportunistic: automated sensor data collection

Example: collecting location traces from users Advantages: lowers burden placed on the user Challenges:
Technically hard to build people underutilized Phone context problem (dynamic environments)

Mobile Computing Cloud

Mobile Sensing Architecture

Components Inform, Share, and Persuasion

Learn
Sense

Sense
Programmability
Managing smartphone sensors with system APIs Challenges: fine-grained control of sensors, portability

Continuous sensing
Resource demanding (e.g., CPU, battery) Energy efficient algorithms Trade-off between accuracy and energy consumption

Phone context
Dynamic environments affect sensor data quality Some solutions:
Collaborative multi-phone inference Admission controls for removing noisy data

Learn: Interpreting Sensor Data (Human Behavior)

Integrating sensor data
Data mining and statistical analysis

Learning algorithms
Supervised: data are hand-labeled (e.g., cooking, driving) Semi-supervised: some of the data are labeled Unsupervised: none of the data are labeled

Human behavior and context modeling

Activity classification Mobility pattern analysis (place logging) Noise mapping in urban environments

Learn: Scaling Models

Scaling model to everyday uses
Dynamic environments; personal differences Large scale deployment (e.g., millions of people)

Models must be adaptive and incorporate people into the process Exploit social networks (community guided learning) to improve data classification and solutions Challenges:
Lack of common machine learning toolkits Lack of large-scale public data sets Lack of public sharing and collaboration repositories of research stuff.

Inform, Share, and Persuasion

Sharing
Data visualization, community awareness, and social networks

Personalized services
Profile user preferences, recommendations, persuasion

Persuasive technology systems that provide tailored feedback with the goal of changing users behavior
Motivation to change human behavior (e.g., healthcare, environmental awareness) Methods: games, competitions, goal setting Interdisciplinary research combining behavioral and social psychology with computer science

Privacy Issues
Respecting the privacy of the user is the most fundamental responsibility of a mobile sensing system Current Solutions
Cryptography Privacy-preserving data mining Processing data locally versus cloud services Group sensing applications is based on user membership and/or trust relationships

Privacy Current Challenges

Reconstruction type attacks
Reverse engineering collected data to obtain invasive information

Second Hand Smoke Problem

How can the privacy of third parties be effectively protected when other people wearing sensors are nearby? How can mismatched privacy policies be managed when two different people are close enough to each other for their sensors to collect information?

Stronger techniques for protecting peoples privacy are needed

Conclusion
Infrastructure has been established Technical Barrier
How to perform privacy-sensitive and resourcesensitive reasoning with dynamic data, while providing useful and effective feedback to users?

Future
Micro and macroscopic views of individuals, communities, and societies Converging solutions relating to social networking, health, and energy