TigerAware: An Innovative Mobile Survey and Sensor Data Collection and Analytics System

From health to community assessment, mobile phones have become a cornerstone of data collection across many areas of research. However, mobile phone-based studies are difficult to develop and deploy, often requiring in house development teams and large portions of research budgets. In this paper, an innovative system called TigerAware is presented to address this issue. TigerAware is developed to offer a generic and customizable tool, which allows researchers to create surveys to collect a wide range of data, including but not limited to question responses, on device sensor data, such as GPS data, and external sensor data, such as blood alcohol level from a Bluetooth breathalyzer. TigerAware is highly modular and uses advanced Web and mobile technologies to incorporate diverse data sources with a rich set of survey question types, requiring little development work by researchers for their individualized studies. TigerAware has been applied to a focus group and several pilot studies and shown excellent capabilities to be easily adapted and deployed for new types of data collection and analytics tasks and a wide range of research fields.