Poster abstract: Virtualizing external wireless sensors for designing personalized smartphone services

By interacting with external sensors, smartphones can gather high-fidelity data on the surrounding environment to develop various environment-aware, personalized applications. In this work we introduce the sensor virtualization module (SVM) which virtualizes external sensors so that smartphone applications can easily utilize a large number of sensing resources. Implemented on the Android platform, our SVM simplifies the management of external sensors by abstracting them as virtual sensors to provide the capability of resolving conflicting data requests from multiple applications and also mashing-up sensing data from different sensors to create new customized sensors. We envision our SVM to open the possibilities of designing novel personalized smartphone applications.