Activity Self-Tracking with Smart Phones: How to Approach Odd Measurements?
This work addresses the challenge of reliable activity tracking for researchers, but it is incremental as it focuses on identifying issues rather than proposing new solutions.
The paper tackled the problem of tracking physical activity using smartphones instead of specialized hardware, identifying several issues encountered in a longitudinal study with hundreds of participants over several months.
Tracking physical activity reliably is becoming central to many research efforts. In the last years specialized hardware has been proposed to measure movement. However, asking study participants to carry additional devices has drawbacks. We focus on using mobile devices as motion sensors. In the paper we detail several issues that we found while using this technique in a longitudinal study involving hundreds of participants for several months. We hope to sparkle a lively discussion at the workshop and attract interest in this method from other researchers.