Design and testing of a sensor middleware for mobile phones

Abstract

Sensing of the physical world is a challenging task for mobile applications. There is no standardized method of obtaining data from sensors or for distributing those data to applications that use it. Consequently, many researchers in mobile sensors end up writing custom software to interact with their sensors. Unfortunately, these customized solutions are often tightly integrated with the researcher's specific task and are rarely used for a different sensing application. A sensor framework is presented that offers a standardized, easy-to-use, and efficient application programming interface (API) to sensor software authors. The API lets them write a sensor module focused on producing useful interpretations of the sensor data, without considering how the produced data will be distributed to client applications. As mobile sensors become more ubiquitous, this work will help researchers working with mobile devices to save development time boost the reliability and speed of sensor software that uses sensor input for context detection.