Brent Longstaff

Ambulation: A Tool for Monitoring Mobility Patterns over Time Using Mobile Phones

An important tool for evaluating the health of patients who suffer from mobility-affecting chronic diseases such as MS, Parkinson’s, and Muscular Dystrophy is assessment of how much they walk. Ambulation is a mobility monitoring system that uses Android and Nokia N95 mobile phones to automatically detect the user’s mobility mode. The user’s only required interaction with the phone is turning it on and keeping it with him/her throughout the day, with the intention that it could be used as his/her everyday mobile phone for voice, data, and other applications, while Ambulation runs in the background. The phone uploads the collected mobility and location information to a server and a secure, intuitive web-based visualization of the data is available to the user and any family, friends or caregivers whom they authorize, allowing them to identify trends in their mobility and measure progress over time and in response to varying treatments.

Ohmage: A General and Extensible End-to-End Participatory Sensing Platform

Participatory sensing (PS) is a distributed data collection and analysis approach where individuals, acting alone or in groups, use their personal mobile devices to systematically explore interesting aspects of their lives and communities [Burke et al. 2006]. These mobile devices can be used to capture diverse spatiotemporal data through both intermittent self-report and continuous recording from on-board sensors and applications. Ohmage (http://ohmage.org) is a modular and extensible open-source, mobile to Web PS platform that records, stores, analyzes, and visualizes data from both prompted self-report and continuous data streams. These data streams are authorable and can dynamically be deployed in diverse settings. Feedback from hundreds of behavioral and technology researchers, focus group participants, and end users has been integrated into ohmage through an iterative participatory design process. Ohmage has been used as an enabling platform in more than 20 independent projects in many disciplines. We summarize the PS requirements, challenges and key design objectives learned through our design process, and ohmage system architecture to achieve those objectives. The flexibility, modularity, and extensibility of ohmage in supporting diverse deployment settings are presented through three distinct case studies in education, health, and clinical research.

FollowMe: enhancing mobile applications with open infrastructure sensing

Despite context-rich smartphone applications being adopted at an unprecedented rate, few use the data produced by the numerous cameras and microphones on walls and other fixed infrastructure. We present a system design called FollowMe aimed at letting mobile applications use these sensors for richer context and better applications. We discuss the benefits of such a system and the new applications it can support. We then describe the key challenges, including establishing relationships between users and sensors that meet the privacy and security requirements of different settings (e.g., a bedroom vs. a public park) with minimal setup overhead, and improving awareness of and control over how data about a person is used by other people.