Sensors in Mobile Devices Knowledge Base

Multiple sensors are incorporated in modern mobile devices. The ubiquity of these mobile devices with a wide range of embedded sensors enables developing new types of sensor networks and novel applications. However, more often than not, users are unaware of the sensor quality in their devices. With the goal of facilitating closer collaboration between sensor developers and users' communities, we developed a knowledge base that contains various characteristics of sensors embedded into mobile devices and their quality analysis. In our novel analysis, we fused both sensor and mobile device characteristics to produce integral sensor quality indicators. Machine learning and clustering techniques were employed. To validate our approach, we collected comprehensive information about sensors currently embedded in more than 9000 mobile devices and analyzed them. We made this knowledge base and evaluation results available to the community. Also, an Android OS-based application that evaluates the quality of sensors in a particular device and provides recommendations on their use was developed and presented for community use. Examples of possible knowledge base applications are given.