We develop the application under the banner of TecVis LP, our consulting company that is dedicated to the area of information-centric architectures with applications in lifelogging, self-awareness and self-monitoring. On the TecVis website, we frequently blog about updates but also selected features of Storica for your information, such as how to use our location label feature in Storica.

So head over to the TecVis website and check out the latest news about Storica! More importantly, head over to the Playstore and download Storica!

Storica is a companion to AIRS. While AIRS allows for recording various aspects of your life, Storica lets you experience it. Storica supports maps with flyover effects and a context-enriched gallery. But most interestingly, Storica support the engaging stories that Dana Pavel developed in her research. It is quite lovely to see these presentations on a mobile screen.

So go, check it out. Experience your life

While this event is about the ‘future of the Internet’ to come, the situation at the organising venues makes me wonder how this future is going to look like. Internet access is controlled (as standard nowadays) through a landing page, needing an individual (per device!) access code. There aren’t enough of these codes around here. I was lucky enough to get one (for certain reasons I won’t get into), finally getting to the Internet.

Is this the sign for the future? Internet everywhere but gated and restricted? The mid of the past decade saw a wave of ‘free Internet’, which seems to have faded. Business interests even in the very edge access seems to have overpowed this wave. While major content clearly is charged (often more than once), it is even the plain access that is controlled/charged/restricted.

When I got into Internet research many years ago, I hoped that the free access to the Internet would become the norm in a few years. We are going in a totally opposite direction, it seems, by restricting the pure access more and more, regardless of the content you want to access. It is a shame that so-called ‘Future Internet’ events are presenting a stage that continues this trend. I would have loved to see different.

Interesting read, have a look!

Check it out to understand the potential usage of AIRS through engaging interfaces within lifestyle management scenarios – or simply just for looking back on your life for self-reflection.

First, you will have to place the AIRS heart rate widget on your launcher screen. Then, you will need to subscribe to the IH sensor in local recording. When pressing the widget on your launcher screen, a window will now appear that shows a camera preview and Start/Cancel buttons.

Using the camera and the built-in flash, AIRS grabs the current preview and calculates the changes in red color, caused by the pulsing blood in your finger (assuming that you indeed placed the finger over the camera lens, also covering the flash light!). These changes are averaged over 10 seconds of recording, after which you can see the estimate of your beats per minute in the upper left corner of the window. You can take up to 3 measurements before AIRS switches off the measurement in order to spare your flash light from burning too long.

Sure, the measurements are not as accurate as using a proper heart rate monitor (such as the one supported by AIRS, namely the AliveTech ECG monitor). However, these values will hopefully provide approximate insights into your heart rate for scenarios such as stress monitoring. Given that the flash light is used, it is not meant for continuous monitoring!

Enjoy this new feature!

Many thanks to all who have downloaded AIRS in the past and tried it out. It shows that AIRS is useful to some extent, which is encouraging and stimulating for future improvements and developments. As you might have noticed, there are frequent updates to AIRS, addressing various issues and improvements. In order to keep you all motivated to download and update in the future, let me share a few ideas and improvements I’m working on:

• battery improvements: the impact on battery lifetime is clearly the biggest issue. Recent changes, such as in the weather polling and the wifi wake lock implementation, have already improved battery life. Current work aims at removing wakelocks in general through using alarms instead. It is interesting to see if this will have a positive impact on the battery life. Overall, however, recording with a large amount of sources (such as Bluetooth and audio sampling) will always consume battery.
• Integration of new sensors: I’m constantly looking into new sources of information to be included into AIRS. That includes local information from the phone but also attached sensors, e.g., via USB accessories. If you have any specific idea for inclusion, please let me know (in the comment below or send an email).
• Improvement of stability: AIRS has been running in own tests and recording for over a year now. Crashes do happen although they are becoming rarer during recording. There are certain information sources that instable from time to time (such as audio recording) and I’m working on improving this.
• Improve usage of database storage: Having moved to SQLite with V2.2 improved the data handling in that it increases security (the data is stored now in the more secure /data directory) but also allows for retrieving the data easier, e.g., for visualisation AIRS already provides a recent history of recordings (when opening program from the notification bar) but more is to come…

Of course, any feedback on desired new features or improvements are always welcome! For now, keep downloading and playing with AIRS!

Unfortunately, Google decided to kill the API support, as reported in TheNextWeb. It is unclear why this happened now but it seems to be related to the demise of iGoogle. The silent discontinuation also meant that the weather ‘sensors’ (e.g., VI or VT) have not been working for some days now – my apologies for that.

Since V2.2.6.3, AIRS has changed its weather provider  to WorldWeatherOnline. Its API is free and it provides similar information as Google used to provide (there’s even pressure and other information, which isn’t yet supported in AIRS).

I hope that this change will work for some time to come but I will observe the service’s reliability and accuracy. Given the dependency of this information on external providers, I cannot guarantee that this information will always be accurate or even available. I hope that you will understand this and help me improve AIRS by providing feedback on your experiences regarding the data being provided by sensors such as VI, VT or other weather sensors.

An answer depends on your particular scenario and what you want to achieve with the recordings. In the following, I will give you a few examples as to what you could record for what type of scenario:

Scenario 1: Activity recording

If you want to record a wide range of activities of what you are doing during a day, what is happening around you and where you go, this scenario is right for you:

Settings

Go to the handler settings of AIRS, and enable GPS (location settings) but don’t use network location (since it might use the cell-based location which is not good for tracking movements). Also enable BT in the Bluetooth settings. In the Media Folders settings, enable the tracking of taking camera pictures. Finally, select all the calendars you want to track in the Calendar settings.

Sensor selection

Now start the local recording with the orange button to select the following sensors:

AS: tracks the surround noise level

BM: battery temperature, gives you an idea of ambient temperature changes

BN and BT: tracks the BT devices around you, giving you a sense of crowdyness of the ambient environment

Ba: tracks your battery usage

Bc: tracks when you charge your battery

Ca: tracks events from the calendars you selected in the settings

CC: gives you a very coarse country-level location (in case everything else fails)

CR: tracks when you are roaming

CS: tracks your cellular signal strength

EB: tracks when you annotate anything via an event widget (you need to place this widget on your homescreen to work)

GI: tracks GPS longitude, latitude, and altitude

GS: tracks your speed via GPS

HS: tracks when plugging in a headset

IC: tracks incoming calls (number and name of callee)

LI: tracks ambient light levels

MO: tracks when you change your mood via a mood widget (you need to place this widget on your homescreen to work)

MP: tracks current artist, track and album being played with Google music

MW: tracks files created when shooting a picture with your camera (if selected in the settings)

OC: tracks outgoing call (name and number)

PU: tracks changes in ambient air pressure (if available on your device)

Rm: tracks available RAM on your devices

SR: tracks received SMS (content, name, number)

SS: tracks sent SMS (content, name, number)

TR: tracks running tasks

VI: tracks weather around you (requires Internet connectivity)

With all of this data, you can create a rich set of activity data. Some of the sensors might not show up in the sensor selection. In this case, the sensor might not be available on your device or it is not enabled in the settings (e.g., the GI sensor is only available when GPS usage is enabled in the GPS settings of AIRS).

Scenario 2: War Driving

War driving scenarios record GPS locations and Wifi information while walking or driving around, effectively creating location-based Wifi maps. This can be easily done in AIRS.

Settings

Enable GPS and Wifi usage in the respective GPS and Location settings of AIRS.

Sensor Selection

Select the following sensors after starting the local recording with the orange button:

GI: record GPS information for longitude, latitude and altitude

WI: record Wifi SSID information

WM: record Wifi MAC information

WS: record Wifi signal strength

Alternatively, you can also record WF instead of the last three sensors but it requires that you parse the WF recording yourself (separating the SSID, MAC and signal strength information). With this recording, you can now correlate the GPS information to the Wifi networks available, including the signal strength.

How to use my recordings?

You can use your recordings either by directly visualising the history of recordings by clicking on the notification bar icon of AIRS and selecting any of the sensors in the dialog window being shown. You set the number of values being visualised in the AIRS General settings. For most values, timeline visualisation is used. For the GPS information, a Google map is shown with your track. The same goes for the weather sensor VI (which then shows the weather information at this point when you click on a marker).

Another option is transporting the recordings off your mobile device. You can do this by synchronising the recordings regularly (see  here for how to do this) in a text file format and use the JAR file that you can find in the Github distribution of AIRS for writing the values into a MySQL database on your computer. With this, you can use any visualisation means available (such as PHP-based scripting, using the Google Visualization APIs).

Does AIRS support such templates?

AIRS supports templates being created through its Quick Start shortcut in the local tab of the main UI. When you create a quick start shortcut (which is placed on your Android launcher homescreen), the settings that are valid at the time of creating the shortcut will be saved and restored when you start AIRS with that particular Quick Start – NOTE that all settings will be overwritten with the ones that were saved when using that shortcut!

With that functionality, you can create templates by selecting all your settings and sensor selections according to examples such as below, then create a Quick Start shortcut after having set everything (a tip: rename your ‘Quick Start’ shortcut on your homescreen according to the scenario that you wanted to capture). You can change the settings then again and create another shortcut. Now, if you changed the names on the homescreen, you will have shortcuts for each of your scenarios on your homescreen!!

What do You Use AIRS for?

I’m curious what you use AIRS for to record. Please drop me an email or comment on this blog entry to reveal your personal recording settings. Is this another scenario that you are after or did you vary the above two scenarios slightly?