Evaluating mobile phones as opportunistic on-body sensors

2011-11-04Mobile phones are an inexpensive sensing solution that can provide insight into the personal environment of the person using the device. However, the challenge for developers is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the sensing capabilities of mobile phones when exploiting them for novel applications. For mobile phones to be useful as opportunistic on-body mobile sensors, they must be able to operate with minimal interaction from the user, operate independently of their position with respect to the body of the user, and conserve the resources of the device. ❧ This thesis discusses these issues and presents three sets of experiments that test sample applications using different sensor types to solve the specific mobile sensing problems of movement tracking and friend proximity discovery