Write a new wikipedia page "Mobile phone based sensing software" for us
posted on June 8, 2017

Write a wikipedia page for us

We are planning a research study that uses mobile phone sensor data to both quantify behaviors known to be related to mental health and wellness. This is an important step in developing digital mental health tools that are simple, easy to use, and fit into the fabric of peoples lives. To accomplish this, we will need to select software that can acquire sensor data from a person’s phone and administer questionnaires.

We are offering $1000 for someone to test and compare mobile phone applications that collect phone sensor data. Because this is a growing area of research, we believe this information would be valuable to many researchers. We believe in open science and would therefore like to have this information published in a Wikipedia page (“Mobile phone based sensing software”).

Which software packages do we already know about

We would like both commercial and free software to be described and we would like the page to be reasonably complete. Here are a few that we are aware of: Purple Robot, Passive Data Kit, Beiwe, the Aware Framework, Psychological Technologies. Apple Research Kit,Research Stack There are certainly more and we would expect you to search for them.

What information would we like to have

Some of the information we would like included are:

  1. Which platforms are supported (Android, iOS)?
  2. Range of sensor data that can be captured.
  3. Do they include a method of obtaining survey data?
  4. Can software support running scripts on the phone?
  5. Can survey questions be launched by phone sensor triggers
  6. How actively is the software maintained (e.g. #developers or #commits per year)
  7. Is software free, open source, commercial?
  8. Which language(s) they need for interfacing with them and which language they are written in
  9. What kind of databases they support and how the data gets from the phones to the databases
  10. Can sensor data configuration be remotely changed (e.g. turn sensors on/off, vary frequency)?
  11. Relative drain on the battery; methods of managing battery life.
  12. Description of the general feature set
  13. Their user base
  14. Generally, how hackable they are
  15. Can the application acquire data from other sources (e.g. wearables, social media, online platforms such as mapping or weather services)
  16. Can the platform monitor data gaps and alert user or investigator to problems?
  17. What is the support for bugs and OS updates?
  18. Does it rely on the community or are there developers supporting it?
  19. What kind of security issues are expectable?

Whom to contact

If you are interested please contact Konrad (koerding@gmail.com)