Beyond location check-ins: Exploring physical and soft sensing to augment social check-in apps

Smartphone sensing research has been advancing at a brisk pace. Yet, current social networking services often only take advantage of location sensing: applications like Foursquare use the phone's GPS and Wi-Fi radios to infer the user's location to simplify checking-in to a place. However, smartphone sensing could be exploited to considerably expand the spectrum of information a user can share with a few clicks with friends: not only the location of an event but activities such as “cooking dinner” or “waiting for a bus” can be predicted and suggested to the user to ease the check-in process. In this paper we show how mobile phone sensing can be used in this sense. For this prediction process to be accurate however, sensors need to be sampled often, with a considerable impact on the phone battery. To alleviate this issue, we explore streams of phone usage data (soft sensors), such as application usage, messages, and phone calls for predicting the user's activity in a more efficient fashion for augmenting mobile social check-in apps. We have deployed our application and collected a dataset of over 2700 check-ins to 48 activities from 20 users. Our analysis shows a prediction accuracy of 75% when offering 5 check-in suggestions to users. Furthermore, we show that when using only soft sensors we can achieve very similar performance to that obtained with real sensors, thereby significantly reducing the impact on the phone battery. This finding might have a potentially high impact on smartphone based activity check-in apps.