Android Sensing Kit

Android Sensing Kit (ASK) is a development framework written in Java, designed for large-scale sensing experiments with Android devices. It supports multiple sensors such as Location, Motion, and Proximity (using both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct). ASK provides also some functionalities that can be used to characterize the users' behaviour and interests, such as the apps usage statistics, activity recognition, calls and messaging logs.

Due to its modular design, a developer can easily extend ASK implementing his/her own functionalities or reusing part of the built-in features offered by the framework. In addition, ASK provides a useful set of features to automatically store and uploads the sensed information to remote servers, simplifying the data collection during the experiments.

This framework is freely inspired by similar works (e.g., Funf Open Sensing Framework, or SensingKit) but, differently from them, ASK supports both the features and building process of the most recent versions of the Android operating system.

Built-in probes

ASK provides a set of built-in probes to gather rich data about the users' activities, behaviour, and social relationships. The currently implemented built-in probes are able to acquire the following data:

• Audio
• Battery
• Weather
• General hardware info
• Display
• Telephony (cells, calls, and sms/mms)
• Calendar events
• Bluetooth connections and devices in proximity
• Wi-Fi Access Points and Wi-Fi Direct devices in proximity
• Activity Recognition
• Raw Sensors (e.g., temperature, light, accelerometer, etc...)
• Location
• Applications (installed and running statistics)

Install

To install ASK, add the following dependency to your .gradle file.

dependencies {
    implementation 'it.matbell:ask:0.5'
}

Using the library

Configuration

ASK configuration is in the JSON format. For example, the following configuration requires to monitor two different things: the user's activity (ActivityRecognitionProbe), and the battery status (BatteryProbe). The first probe is executed every 5 minutes and data related to the user's activity is stored in a file named activity.csv, while the second probe is executed every 60 seconds and stores its data in another file, called battery.csv.

{
    "probes" : [
        {
            "name" : "ActivityRecognitionProbe",
            "updateInterval" : 300,
            "logFile" : "activity.csv"
        },
        {
            "name" : "BatteryProbe",
            "interval" : 60,
            "logFile" : "battery.csv"
        }
    ]
}

Start ASK

Starting ASK is very simple. The following lines load the configuration and start the background service which executes the required probes until it is stopped.

ASK ask = new ASK(this, getResources().getString(R.string.ask_conf));
ask.start();

Stop ASK

To stop the probes execution, use the following code:

ask.stop();

License

Copyright (c) 2017. Mattia Campana, m.campana@iit.cnr.it,
campana.mattia@gmail.com

This file is part of Android Sensing Kit (ASK).

Android Sensing Kit (ASK) is free software: you can redistribute it
and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.

Android Sensing Kit (ASK) is distributed in the hope that it will be
useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with Android Sensing Kit (ASK).  If not, see
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.`

This library is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License 3.0, allowing to use the library in your applications.