AWARE

Research Goal

AWARE is an Android framework dedicated to instrument, infer, log and share mobile context information, for application developers, researchers and smartphone users. AWARE captures hardware-, software-, and human-based data. The data is then analyzed using AWARE plugins. They transform data into information you can understand.

Documentation and downloads: https://awareframework.com

User

The mobile application allows you to instrument your smartphone. The data is saved locally on your mobile phone.

Scientist

Install AWARE on the participants phone, select the data you want to collect and that is it. Running a mobile related study has never been easier.

Developer

AWARE is available as an Android & iOS library. Create richer context-aware applications for the end-users.

AWARE client-server architecture

Deploy large-scale, distributed studies, or personal studies:

  • AWARE-hosted or self-hosted databases
  • Run concurrent studies
  • Study-specific or public plugins
  • Specify study’s active sensors and data sampling
  • Enroll participants via a QRCode or a direct URL
  • Collaborate with other pre-registered co-researchers
  • Monitor the study’s status (e.g., amount of data, participation)
  • Label and group sets of participants
  • Remotely design and trigger mobile questionnaires (ESMs) using Google Calendar
  • Remotely request or clear the study data

Open-source, Apache 2.0

You can download, modify, deploy AWARE without any licensing restrictions. You can find the source-code here: https://github.com/denzilferreira/aware-client

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

When installing AWARE on a mobile phone, a randomly generated 128-bit Unique User ID is generated, reset every time the user joins a new study. By design, AWARE does not collect any personal identifiers in its data (e.g., contacts’ phone numbers, users’ calendar events, etc.). By default, the mobile client only stores data locally on the users’ phones. Integrating the mobile client with an AWARE Server allows replication of the data to a secure remote database. AWARE offers data encryption and obfuscation by default, crucial to safeguard the transition between local-only data and shared data. The collected data is presented on the user’s mobile phone, within the AWARE mobile clients (Android & iOS). During a study deployment, a user can withdraw and remove the collected data from the server and the mobile phone at any time, directly from his phone. As the data is primarily stored on the users’ device, it can be backed up and opened by connecting the device to your computer and using an SQLite client. The data is stored in the folder AWARE of the external storage of the device (i.e., /Android/data/com.aware.phone/AWARE or /AWARE/, depending on the device manufacturer and the availability of external storage).