Logging user activities and sensor data on mobile devices

Abstract

The goal of this work is a unified approach for collecting data about user actions on mobile devices in an appropriate granularity for user modeling. To fulfill this goal, we have designed and implemented a framework for mobile user activity logging on Windows Mobile PDAs based on the MyExperience project. We have extended this system with hardware and software sensors to monitor phone calls, messaging, peripheral devices, media players, GPS sensors, networking, personal information management, web browsing, system behavior and applications usage. It is possible to detect when, at which location and how a user employs an application or accesses certain information, for example. To evaluate our framework, we applied it in several usage scenarios. We were able to validate that our framework is able to collect meaningful information about the user. We also outline preliminary work on analyzing the logged data sets. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.