Sensing Meets Mobile Social Networks: The Design, Implementation and Evaluation of the CenceMe Application

We present the design, implementation, evaluation, and user experiences of the CenceMe application, which represents the first system that; combines the inference of the presence of individuals using off-the-shelf, sensor-enabled mobile phones with sharing of this information through social networking applications such as Facebook and MySpace. We discuss the system challenges for the development of software oil the Nokia N95 mobile phone. We present the design and tradeoffs of split-level classification, whereby personal sensing presence (e.g., walking, in conversation, at the gym) is derived front classifiers which execute in part oil the phones and in part oil the backend servers to achieve scalable inference. We report performance measurements that characterize the computational requirements of the software and the energy consumption of the CenceMe phone client. We validate the system through a user study where twenty two people, including undergraduates, graduates and faculty, used CenceMe continuously over a three week period in a campus town. From this user study we learn how the system performs in a production environment and what uses people find for a personal sensing system.