Implementing Monitoring Systems in Mobile Applications – a Case Study

Abstract

During the last years, the evolution of mobile applications allowed the developers to become more and more creative. In this way, we can imagine many applications models with a real impact in the real life. In this article we are trying to present a case study for a monitoring system using the Android platform and the benefits of computer networks. We use the power of mobile sockets and mobile threads, integrating them in a complex architecture in order to obtain a real monitoring system. As an immediate application, we propose a baby monitoring systems so that the children could be remotely supervised by their parents. The case study is based on an Android mobile client-server architecture and also uses the capabilities offered by the phone's speaker and microphone. We intend to have a robust application and that's why we initially preferred Network Service Discovery and Android P2P, but these functionalities are implemented starting with Android 4.1. So, we emulated all these functionalities by using a model based on sockets and server sockets.Keywords: Mobile Monitoring Systems, Android Implementation, Mobile Sockets, Mobile Architectures(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)1IntroductionIn this article we present a case study of a mobile monitoring application made on Android platform. Our goal is to implement an application which can be used by parents in order to supervise their children; this vision could be used to also improve the proposals about the intelligent tutoring systems described by [1] or to implement innovative systems described by [2]. We propose the following scenario: the baby is in a room and the parent is in other room; in both rooms they have smart-phones with our application. Without using the GSM provider, the parent can hear the activity of the baby. Eventually, if the baby cries, the system will warn the parent about the situation.The application is designed to run in some conditions and rules:* the application does not use the GSM capabilities and it can also run on a tablet;* the minimum required platform is Android 2.0;* the application uses only a Wi-Fi connection and doesn't need any external remote server;* the application uses the speakers and the microphones of the involved smartphones.Initially, we intended to use Network Service Discovery [3] and Android P2P, but these functionalities are implemented starting with Android 4.1. For these reasons, we preferred to emulate these capabilities by using the socket's technology. As a conclusion, the only restrictions are the following: smart-phones with a Wi-Fi connection, speaker and microphone. As we know, these resources are already available on almost all the smartphones, so the proposed application could be installed on a significant number of mobile devices. Although the new HTML5 standard could represent a solid enterprise mobile computing foundation and a feasible path towards the proliferation of the applications as described in [4], we consider that it is extremely important that an application could be used by a large number of clients with normal smart-phones. We are also conscious that, according to [5], Mobile Application Development is a popular topic these days, when tons of mobile apps are released and available tools and resources are expanding.Nowadays, the wireless networks have many sensors and protocols used to capture and transmit data [6], but one of the oldest methods of network communication provided by Java is by using Transfer Control Protocol (TCP) sockets. For this, we use two classes: Socket and Server Socket, the latter being the one to trace the connections that are made. For the audio streaming, it is used the device's microphone which is operated by Android through the objects of type Audio Recorder. The information received by the microphone is encoded (using Audio Format class) through predefined constants (ENCODING PCM16BIT) and it is allocated abroadcast channel (in our case CHANNELINMONO). …