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I worked on the Auracle application as part of my first-year research in the Auracle Lab, during which I was mentored by Professor Kotz and Sougata Sen. My research project was titled, "A mobile application for aggregating, storing, and presenting Auracle-generated eating behavior data." It focused on (1) prompting the Auracle’s user and collecting Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) responses from the user and (2) receiving, processing, displaying, and storing data from the Auracle wearable device.
The overall Auracle project is two-fold:
(1) The Auracle device is an earpiece that detects the wearer’s real-time
eating patterns, such as the time, length, and frequency of eating episodes, in
free-living conditions.
(2) The Auracle mobile application, a crucial component of the research
process, is an iOS mobile application that connects the Auracle device to the user’s personal
smartphone via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). The app receives, processes, displays, and
stores real-time data from the Auracle device. The Auracle application was originally developed
by the DALI Lab.
I contributed to the iOS application by adding two new features, which were (1) prompting the Auracle’s user and collecting Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) responses from the user and (2) receiving, processing, displaying, and storing data from the Auracle wearable device.
Several lab studies using the Auracle device require periodic user response. I added functionality to allow the app to periodically prompt the user for an EMA response. When a user selects “Fill Out Now” in the alert, the screen transitions to a horizontal paging UIScrollView that enables the user to easily scroll between questions accessed from a remote database. Users can respond to each question using a slider. The slider has a configurable lower and upper response bound (e.g., “not at all” to “extremely”) which maps to a response from 0 to 100 in the backend. After answering the last question, the user taps “Done,” and the question ID, time stamp, question, and response value are stored locally in the phone. At the end of the study, the researcher can export the aggregated user responses in the form of a CSV.
In this part of the project, I worked on connecting the Auracle app to the Auracle wearable device via a Bluetooth connection, as well as processing, displaying, and storing the data received. To initialize the communication between an Auracle device and a phone, the phone should be paired with the Auracle device. When the app is launched, a “Connect Auracle" button appears. Upon tapping the button, the app scans for and displays nearby Auracle devices in a list view. The user chooses an Auracle device to connect to, and the “Status” screen changes to indicate a successful connection. The app now receives data from the Auracle device. The data are displayed in a daily timeline and stored in the phone’s local database according to the message structure in the figure shown below. Finally, the researcher is able to access all transmitted data by exporting the aggregated data in a spreadsheet (CSV) file.
© Esme Chen 2020
