Activity recognition for Smart City scenarios: Google Play Services vs. MoST facilities

The ever increasing diffusion of smartphones today equipped with several physical and virtual sensors allow to directly collect information about surrounding physical and logical context that range from monitoring current social pulse of individuals and entire communities to detecting user current physical activity. Enabling those advanced sensing capabilities requires complex signal processing, machine learning, and resource management algorithms that are often beyond the skills of many mobile app developers. This paper describes the relevance of these facilities for mobile crowdsensing applications in Smart City scenarios and presents our solution for activity detection, comparing it with the reference implementations provided by Google as part of the Google Play Services library.