In the past few years, the use of smartphones has increased exponentially, and so have the capabilities of such devices. Together with an increase in raw processing power, modern smartphones are equipped with a wide variety of sensors and expose an extensive set of API (Accessible Programming Interface). These capabilities allow us to extract a wide spectrum of data that ranges from information about the environment (e.g., position, orientation) to user habits (e.g., which apps she uses and when), as well as about the status of the operating system itself (e.g., memory, network adapters). This data can be extremely valuable in many research fields such as user authentication, intrusion detection and detection of information leaks. For these reasons, researchers need to use a solid and reliable logging tool to collect data from mobile devices. In this paper, we first survey the existing logging tools available on the Android platform, comparing the features offered by different tools and their impact on the system, and highlighting some of their shortcomings. Then, we present DELTA - Data Extraction and Logging Tool for Android, which improves the existing Android logging solutions in terms of flexibility, fine-grained tuning capabilities, extensibility, and available set of logging features. We performed a full implementation of DELTA and we run a thorough evaluation on its performance. The results show that our tool has low impact on the performance of the system, on battery consumption, and on user experience. Finally, we make the DELTA source code and toolset available to the research community.
@cite_0: This paper presents MyExperience, a system for capturing both objective and subjective in situ data on mobile computing activities. MyExperience combines the following two techniques: 1) passive logging of device usage, user context, and environmental sensor readings, and 2) active context-triggered user experience sampling to collect in situ, subjective user feedback. MyExperience currently runs on mobile phones and supports logging of more than 140 event types, including: 1) device usage such as communication, application usage, and media capture, 2) user context such as calendar appointments, and 3) environmental sensing such as Bluetooth and GPS. In addition, user experience sampling can be targeted to moments of interest by triggering off sensor readings. We present several case studies of field deployments on people's personal phones to demonstrate how MyExperience can be used effectively to understand how people use and experience mobile technology.
One of the first works on device usage logging in the literature is , targeted at the Windows Mobile platform and presented in @cite_0 . It is a logging tool capable of collecting context data and performing actions in response to triggers configured by the experiment designer. Examples include presenting a survey to the user after a phone call has ended or when she is near a particular location. Even though targeted at an obsolete operating system, it is still relevant for historical reasons, being one of the first mobile device logging applications.