Communications of the ACM
Take Control of Your Phone's Sensors
The system, dubbed Funf, has two main components: One is an application called Funf Journal, which runs on phones that use Googles Android operating system and governs the collection and exportation of sensor data. The other is a set of tools for managin
Credit: Courtesy of MIT's Media Lab
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab have developed Funf, a phone-based data collection system for self-tracking applications.
Funf is available as a free, open source download that consists an application called Funf Journal, which governs the collection and exportation of sensor data. It also includes a set of tools for managing and visualizing the sensor data on a desktop computer.
Funf Journal provides checkbox menus that enable users to specify how frequently a given phone sensor will collect data and for how long. The program can broadcast configuration updates to participants in a study. The controller for each sensor is called a probe, and each probe can look for patterns in the sensor data. Each of the higher-level probes is configurable through the same type of menu that governs the sensors themselves.
Funf Journal comes with about 30 probes built in, but the researchers want other developers to create more high-level probes. "There are a lot of other research groups that are reinventing the wheel," says Funf developer Nadav Aharony. "We felt that we were so advanced in this field that we wanted to share this."
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