By 2025, when most of today's psychology undergraduates will be in their mid-30s, more than 5 billion people on our planet will be using ultra-broadband, sensor-rich smartphones far beyond the abilities of today's iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries. Although smartphones were not designed for psychological research, they can collect vast amounts of ecologically valid data, easily and quickly, from large global samples. If participants download the right "psych apps," smartphones can record where they are, what they are doing, and what they can see and hear and can run interactive surveys, tests, and experiments through touch screens and wireless connections to nearby screens, headsets, biosensors, and other peripherals. This article reviews previous behavioral research using mobile electronic devices, outlines what smartphones can do now and will be able to do in the near future, explains how a smartphone study could work practically given current technology (e.g., in studying ovulatory cycle effects on women's sexuality), discusses some limitations and challenges of smartphone research, and compares smartphones to other research methods. Smartphone research will require new skills in app development and data analysis and will raise tough new ethical issues, but smartphones could transform psychology even more profoundly than PCs and brain imaging did.

The Smartphone Psychology Manifesto

Today's mobile phones represent a rich and powerful computing platform, given their sensing, processing and communication capabilities. Phones are also part of the everyday life of billions of people, and therefore represent an exceptionally suitable tool for conducting social and psychological experiments in an unobtrusive way.de the ability of sensing individual emotions as well as activities, verbal and proximity interactions among members of social groups. Moreover, the system is programmable by means of a declarative language that can be used to express adaptive rules to improve power saving. We evaluate a system prototype on Nokia Symbian phones by means of several small-scale experiments aimed at testing performance in terms of accuracy and power consumption. Finally, we present the results of real deployment where we study participants emotions and interactions. We cross-validate our measurements with the results obtained through questionnaires filled by the users, and the results presented in social psychological studies using traditional methods. In particular, we show how speakers and participants' emotions can be automatically detected by means of classifiers running locally on off-the-shelf mobile phones, and how speaking and interactions can be correlated with activity and location measures.

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EmotionSense: a mobile phones based adaptive platform for experimental social psychology research

Today’s mobile phones are far from the mere communication devices they were 10 years ago. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and advanced computing hardware, phones can be used to infer users’ location, activity, social setting, and more. As devices become increasingly intelligent, their capabilities evolve beyond inferring context to predicting it, and then reasoning and acting upon the predicted context. This article provides an overview of the current state of the art in mobile sensing and context prediction paving the way for full-fledged anticipatory mobile computing. We present a survey of phenomena that mobile phones can infer and predict, and offer a description of machine learning techniques used for such predictions. We then discuss proactive decision making and decision delivery via the user-device feedback loop. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of anticipatory mobile computing.

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~pejovicv/docs/Pejovic14AnticipatorySurvey.pdf

Anticipatory Mobile Computing: A Survey of the State of the Art and Research Challenges

Just recently emerged a new paradigm for internet-based software systems which is called as cloud computing. The cloud provides scalable processing power and several kinds of connectable services. This distributed architecture has many similarities with a typical wireless sensor network, where a lot of motes, which are responsible for sensing and local preprocessing, are interconnected with wireless connections. Since wireless sensor networks are limited in their processing power, battery life and communication speed, cloud computing usually offers the opposite, which makes it attractive for long term observations, analysis and use in different kinds of environments and projects, since the basic infrastructure remains the same.In this paper we present a model, which combines the concept of wireless sensor networks with the cloud computing paradigm, and show how both can benefit from this combination.

Combining cloud computing and wireless sensor networks

Recording a personal life log (PLL) of daily activities in a ubiquitous environment is an emerging application of information technology. In this work, we present a single tri-axial accelerometer-based PLL system capable of human activity recognition and exercise information generation. Our PLL system exhibits two main functions: activity recognition and exercise information generation. For activity recognition, the system first recognizes a state of daily activities based on the statistical and spectral features of the accelerometer signals. An activity within the recognized state is then recognized using a set of augmented features, including autoregressive coefficients, signal magnitude area, and tilt angle, via linear discriminant analysis and hierarchical artificial neural networks. Upon the recognition of each activity, the system further estimates exercise information that includes energy expenditure based on metabolic equivalents, stride length, step count, walking distance, and walking speed. Our PLL system operates in real-time, and the life log information it generates is archived in a daily log database. We have validated our PLL system for six daily activities (i.e., lying, standing, walking, going-upstairs, going-downstairs, and driving) via subject-independent and subject-dependent recognition on a total of twenty subjects, achieving an average recognition accuracy of 94.43 and 96.61%, respectively. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of a portable real-time PLL system that could be used for u-lifecare and u-healthcare services in the near future.

A single tri-axial accelerometer-based real-time personal life log system capable of human activity recognition and exercise information generation

BeTelGeuse is an extensible data collection platform for mobile devices, which also automatically infers higher level context from sensor data. In this article, the authors introduce BeTelGeuse's architecture and current features, and evaluate its impact on mobile phone performance.

J. Kukkonen

Papers

BeTelGeuse: A Platform for Gathering and Processing Situational Data