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A multi-site study on walkability, data sharing and privacy perception using mobile sensing data gathered from the mk-sense platform

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Abstract

Walking is a fundamental part of a physically active lifestyle, it is one of everyday activities that positively impacts health and wellbeing. In this paper we describe the challenges and experiences of conducting a sensing campaign in the wild. We make use of mk-sense; a software platform to facilitate the deployment of collaborative sensing campaigns. We elaborate on two cross-cultural studies conducted in four different countries (Mexico, Turkey, Spain, and Switzerland) with a total of 77 participants. We present a detailed description of the data collected from one of the studies aimed at measuring walkability around three different university campuses. The analysis of the data shows that walkability can be assessed using information from the sensors in the smartphones and results from surveys answered by participants. In addition, we analyze issues about data sharing and privacy awareness.

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Notes

  1. Funf: Open sensing framework. http://funf.media.mit.edu.

  2. https://laravel.com/.

  3. Walkscore: https://www.walkscore.com.

  4. http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/sensors/sensors_motion.html.

  5. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/Location.html.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the participants of the two sensing campaigns described in the paper for contributing their time and effort in making them successful. This work was partially funded by (1) the Co-Funded Brain Circulation Scheme Project “Pervasive Healthcare: Towards Computational Networked Life Science” (TÜBITAK Co-Circ 2236, Grant agreement number: 112C005) supported by TÜBİTAK and EC FP7 Marie Curie Action COFUND and (2) the EC FP7 Marie Curie Action “UBIHEALTH-Exchange of Excellence in Ubiquitous Computing Technologies to Address Healthcare Challenges” (Project number 316337).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, Ulster University, Newtownabbey, UK

    N. Hernández

  2. Computer Science Department, CICESE Research Center, Ensenada, Mexico

    J. Favela

  3. Computer Engineering Department, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    B. Arnrich & C. Ersoy

  4. Psychology Department, University of Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

    B. Demiray

  5. MAmI Research Laboratory, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain

    J. Fontecha

Authors
  1. N. Hernández
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  2. B. Arnrich
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  3. J. Favela
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  4. C. Ersoy
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  5. B. Demiray
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  6. J. Fontecha
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Correspondence to N. Hernández.

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Hernández, N., Arnrich, B., Favela, J. et al. A multi-site study on walkability, data sharing and privacy perception using mobile sensing data gathered from the mk-sense platform. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 10, 2199–2211 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-017-0642-x

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