iEpi is a powerful data acquisition and analysis system for measuring, collecting, storing and analyzing human behavioural data collected via Android smartphones. iEpi has the capacity to measure on-board sensors such as GPS, accelerometer, or compass, use communications interfaces such as Bluetooth and WiFi for both sensing and communications, acquire data from federated Bluetooth sensors, log internet use, and deliver surveys based on timing or sensed context. iEpi seamlessly and opportunistically uploads data, based on the context. Data is automatically parsed and inserted in the an SQL database for analysis. A growing suite of preliminary and secondary analysis tools for data cleaning and aggregation, user state inferencing, and localization can be deployed to quickly get more abstract representations of the data.
iEpi is designed to be an experimental platform, deployed with a target population, and configured to provide data and survey results to fit the needs of the experimenter. iEpi measurement regimes and surveys can be altered remotely by the researcher and pushed to the phone if a change in experimental process is warranted.
iEpi’s SQL backend has been successfully integrated with common analysis suites such as R, MATLab, GoogleMaps, MapPoint and ARCGIS. Simple queries can result in delimited data files suitable for integration into simulation environments such as Anylogic or NS3.
We are always open to entertaining new collaborations in deploying iEpi, and continue to extend the measurement and analysis codebases to enhance functionality, reliability and speed analysis.