NSense: A people-centric, non-intrusive opportunistic sensing tool for contextualizing nearness

In the context of social well-being and context awareness several eHealth applications have been focused on tracking activities, such as sleep or specific fitness habits, with the purpose of promoting physical well-being with increasing success. Sensing technology can, however, be applied to improve social well-being, in addition to physical well-being. This paper addresses NSense, a tool that has been developed to capture and to infer social interaction patterns aiming to assist in the promotion of social well-being. Experiments carried out under realistic settings validate the NSense performance in terms of its capability to infer social interaction context based on our proposed computational utility functions. Traces obtained during the experiments are available via the CRAWDAD international trace repository.