SocioXensor: Measuring user behaviour and user eXperience in conteXt with mobile devices

Mobile devices tend to travel along with people wherever they are and whatever they are doing, and consequently enter various social contexts of that person. This literally puts these devices in an ideal position to capture several aspects of social phenomena. We are currently designing and implementing SocioXensor, an extensible toolkit that exploits the hardware sensors and software capabilities of contemporary mobile devices like PDAs and smartphones to capture objective data about human behaviour and social context (e.g., proximity and communication), together with objective data about application usage and highly subjective data about user experience (e.g., needs, frustrations, and other feelings). Thus, we provide the social sciences with a research instrument to gain a much deeper, detailed, and dynamic insight into these phenomena and their relations, which in turn can inform the design of successful context-sensitive applications.