Sensing mobile phone interaction in the field

Sensing how people interact with their mobile phones under real-world conditions can be an expensive and time-consuming task, especially if data from a large number of users and over a long period of time is needed. However, in order to improve the utility and usability of mobile applications, field studies are often considered to be more suitable than laboratory evaluations. In this paper, we present an innovative approach towards the automatic and transparent sensing of mobile phone usage, which is based on the background observation and analysis of user interactions with a mobile application under real-world conditions. We have implemented a software framework for this purpose, which can easily be added to an Android application, in order to record how users interact with it and transmit the acquired data to a server. We evaluated our framework with regard to its performance and memory consumption on the one hand, and by adding it to an application in the marketplace on the other hand. The results from about 300 users over one week showed that the framework runs stable and with very low resource demands.