Comparison of Commercial Pedometer Applications: A Rigorous Approach

In recent years, there has been a growth in the development of numerous software algorithms dedicated to pedometers (or step counters). This surge has subsequently spurred the creation of various context-aware smartphone applications for sports, healthcare, and other fields. Most works that compare commercial offerings do not adopt a sound and rigorous method, as human testers are asked to stick to a defined set of constraints, and experiments are carried out within controlled environments. However, each application is still tested separately, with no guarantee that the conditions are really the same, plus these conditions cannot resemble the real environment where pedometers are going to be used. Our proposal features a software solution that records the sensor readings of human testers and inject the exact same sensor values into different pedometer applications to produce a sound result by using the same testing conditions. We implement our solution and perform with it a comparison study.