Towards the Interpretation of Sound Measurements from Smartphones Collected with Mobile Crowdsensing in the Healthcare Domain: An Experiment with Android Devices.

Robin Kraft,Rüdiger Pryss,Manfred Reichert

doi:10.3390/s22010170

Robin Kraft, Rüdiger Pryss + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s22010170

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Abstract

The ubiquity of mobile devices fosters the combined use of ecological momentary assessments (EMA) and mobile crowdsensing (MCS) in the field of healthcare. This combination not only allows researchers to collect ecologically valid data, but also to use smartphone sensors to capture the context in which these data are collected. The TrackYourTinnitus (TYT) platform uses EMA to track users’ individual subjective tinnitus perception and MCS to capture an objective environmental sound level while the EMA questionnaire is filled in. However, the sound level data cannot be used directly among the different smartphones used by TYT users, since uncalibrated raw values are stored. This work describes an approach towards making these values comparable. In the described setting, the evaluation of sensor measurements from different smartphone users becomes increasingly prevalent. Therefore, the shown approach can be also considered as a more general solution as it not only shows how it helped to interpret TYT sound level data, but may also stimulate other researchers, especially those who need to interpret sensor data in a similar setting. Altogether, the approach will show that measuring sound levels with mobile devices is possible in healthcare scenarios, but there are many challenges to ensuring that the measured values are interpretable.

Highlights

Smart mobile devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous
For the evaluation of the smartphone devices equipped with the app, a sound signal was generated, for which the volume was adjusted to different sound levels using a professional calibrated sound level meter (SLM)
An experiment was described with the objective to make a large data set of environmental sound measurements captured with smartphones and stored in the TrackYourTinnitus (TYT) database usable and comparable to enable meaningful interpretations in the context of tinnitus research

Summary

Introduction

Smart mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Their capabilities allow the combined use of ecological momentary assessments (EMA) and mobile crowdsensing (MCS) in the healthcare domain to collect qualitative longitudinal and ecologically valid data, and to use sensors of smartphones as well as connected external sensors (e.g., wearables) to capture the context in which these data are collected [1]. The overall objective of this work is to investigate the correlations between environmental sound level and reported tinnitus symptoms. If the sound levels can be correlated to questionnaire-collected data, new insights might be unveiled as the sound level data can be considered more objective than data from completed questionnaires alone (e.g., to allow predictions on tinnitus loudness based on the sound data). In this context, further note that, for tinnitus and many other diseases and disorders, longitudinal studies that are able to collect ecologically valid data for such a long time are still very rare. The experiment at hand is important for TYT, but the results and lessons learned may be of much greater value for the healthcare domain in general

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