How long do people take to react to smartphone notifications?

Notifications are one of the most essential features of smartphones. App developers and researchers typically want to reach their audience at opportune times. We analyzed almost 10 million notifications collected from 922 users. Most notifications were logged in the late morning and late afternoon. Between 8 pm and 11 pm, the interaction delay (time between … Read more

Mobile Sensing in Personality Science

How can mobile sensing, using the smartphone’s sensors for recording and storing data, help in personality science? Read our comprehensive book chapter on this topic. We cover an overview of related work and show the differences in researching personality traits vs. personality states with mobile sensing. We showcase a concrete mobile-sensing application and provide a … Read more

Presentation at IEEE EMBS event

Today, I gave a presentation at an IEEE EMBS (Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society) event. My talk was about Predicting Adherence to Ecological Momentary Assessments, and I presented our findings about the predictability of users of a smartphone app filling out questionnaires. Based on smartphone sensor data, we utilized machine learning to try to … Read more

Self-Assessment of Having COVID-19 With the Corona Check mHealth App

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a lack of knowledge about the novel virus and a lack of widely available tests, getting first feedback about being infected was not easy. To support all citizens in this respect, we developed the mobile health app Corona Check. Based on a self-reported questionnaire about symptoms and … Read more

Corona Health – A Study- and Sensor-based Mobile App Platform Exploring Aspects of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Physical and mental well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic is typically assessed via surveys, which might make it difficult to conduct longitudinal studies and might lead to data suffering from recall bias. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) driven smartphone apps can help alleviate such issues, allowing for in situ recordings. Implementing such an app is not trivial, … Read more

Developing Apps for Researching the COVID-19 Pandemic with the TrackYourHealth Platform

Through lockdowns and other severe changes to daily life, almost everyone is affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists and medical doctors are – among others – mainly interested in researching, monitoring, and improving physical and mental health of the general population. Mobile health apps (mHealth), and apps conducting ecological momentary assessments (EMA) respectively, can help … Read more

MobRec – Mobile Platform for Decentralized Recommender Systems

Imagine getting recommendations, for example, for music or TV shows, based on similar people you pass by on the street. No server backend needed, all via device-to-device communication. We designed and implemented such a system. You can find our full article published in IEEE Access here (PDF) and the code on GitHub. We build the … Read more

What data are smartphone users willing to share with researchers?

Expanding on our earlier work on privacy in mobile sensing/data collection apps, we evaluated the data we collected with TYDR. Our experimental evaluation based on the first two month of data collected with TYDR shows evidence that our users accept our proposed privacy model. Based on data about granting TYDR all or no Android system … Read more

Context Data Categories and Privacy Model for Mobile Data Collection Apps

Context-aware applications stemming from diverse fields like mobile health, recommender systems, and mobile commerce potentially benefit from knowing aspects of the user’s personality. As filling out personality questionnaires is tedious, we propose the prediction of the user’s personality from smartphone sensor and usage data. In order to collect data for researching the relationship between smartphone … Read more

Do You Like What I Like? Similarity Estimation in Proximity-based Mobile Social Networks

While existing social networking services tend to connect people who know each other, people show a desire to also connect to yet unknown people in physical proximity. Existing research shows that people tend to connect to similar people. Utilizing technology in order to stimulate human interaction between strangers, we consider the scenario of two strangers … Read more