Development of Sensor Based Applications for the Android Platform: an Approach Based on Realistic Simulation

Smart phones are equipped with a wide range of sensors (such as GPS, light, accelerometer, gyroscope, etc.) and allow users to be connected everywhere. These characteristics offer a rich information source for creating context-aware applications. However, testing these applications in the lab, before their deployment, could become a hard task or impossible because of sensors correlation, too wide testing area or an excessive number of people involved. This work aims to solve these problems carrying out the testing in a simulator, simulating the world in which the application user is immersed into. Tester controls her avatar and the avatar has a simulated smart phone that is connected with the user’s smart phone. Applications under test are installed on the real smart phone and are compiled with a library that replaces standard services of the sensors by others that offer data sensor from the simulator (depending on the simulated smart phone context) instead of real world.