MobSens: Making Smart Phones Smarter

Smart mobile phones are a widely available class of computing platforms with rich internal devices and a communications infrastructure that can be appropriated and exploited to support environmental sensing, social networks, and healthcare applications. In this article, the authors discuss experiences and lessons learned from deploying four mobile sensing applications on off-the-shelf mobile phones in a framework called MobSens that contains elements of health, social, and environmental sensing at both individual and community levels. They describe the main components of these applications, which facilitate logging and external communications. They also outline the challenges faced when building and testing such applications and describe their strategies for overcoming them.