ohmage: An open mobile system for activity and experience sampling

Abstract

We present ohmage, a mobile to web platform that records, analyzes, and visualizes data from both prompted experience samples entered by the user, as well as continuous streams of data passively collected from sensors onboard the mobile device. ohmage has been used in a number of research health studies. Key challenges in these deployments are engaging participants to sustain data collection in long-lived campaigns, conserving battery power, and extracting accurate inferences from the collected streams. To address these challenges, we have incorporated feedback from hundreds of behavioral and technology researchers, focus group participants, and end-users of the system in an iterative design process. We summarize this rich feedback, and present the resulting system.