m^k-sense: An Extensible Platform to Conduct Multi-institutional Mobile Sensing Campaigns

Mobile sensing has become a growing area of research in pervasive
healthcare. In this paper we present m^k-sense, an open framework for mobile sensing on smartphones.  m^k-sense is an initiative to reduce the efforts of researchers involved in multi-institutional sensing campaign. It is designed to facilitate the collaboration of researchers that run simultaneous data collection efforts in different locations. We illustrate the use of m^k-sense with two cross-cultural studies conducted in four different countries (Turkey, Mexico, Switzerland, and Spain) with a total of 77 participants. In this paper, we describe the challenges and experience of conducting research in the wild by using m^k-sense as sensing platform. Finally, we present how the conducted studies influenced the design decisions of m^k-sense, including features, and tools to monitor data gathering in real-time.