Sensing meets mobile social networks

TLDR

The study addresses software development challenges on the Nokia N95 mobile phone. The authors aim to design, implement, evaluate, and assess user experiences of CenceMe, the first system that infers individuals’ presence via sensor‑enabled phones and shares it through social networking platforms. CenceMe employs a split‑level classification scheme, executing part of the presence inference on the phone and part on backend servers, and is validated through a three‑week user study of 22 participants. Performance measurements show the computational load and energy consumption of the phone client, while the user study demonstrates acceptable production‑environment performance and identifies practical uses for personal sensing.

Abstract

We present the design, implementation, evaluation, and user ex periences of theCenceMe application, which represents the first system that combines the inference of the presence of individuals using off-the-shelf, sensor-enabled mobile phones with sharing of this information through social networking applications such as Facebook and MySpace. We discuss the system challenges for the development of software on the Nokia N95 mobile phone. We present the design and tradeoffs of split-level classification, whereby personal sensing presence (e.g., walking, in conversation, at the gym) is derived from classifiers which execute in part on the phones and in part on the backend servers to achieve scalable inference. We report performance measurements that characterize the computational requirements of the software and the energy consumption of the CenceMe phone client. We validate the system through a user study where twenty two people, including undergraduates, graduates and faculty, used CenceMe continuously over a three week period in a campus town. From this user study we learn how the system performs in a production environment and what uses people find for a personal sensing system.