Concept, Design and Implementation of Sensing as a
Service Framework
Rischan Mafrur I Gde Dharma Nugraha
School of Electrical School of Electrical
Engineering Engineering
Chonnam National University Chonnam National University
Gwangju, South Korea Gwangju, South Korea
rischanlab@gmail.com gdebig@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Today, personal data is becoming a new economic asset. The
data that we generated from our smartphone, our interaction
in social media, its like oil in the Internet. An increasing
of personal data in the internet cause some issue such as
privacy issue, complexity processing, and etc. That will
require a highly reliable, available, serviceable, and secure
infrastructure at its core and robust innovation. This paper
propose a new concept, design and implementation of sensing
as a service framework. This framework has three main
components: 1) personal data collector application; 2) web
portal that has user friendly interface and shows responsive
analysis result of personal data that can be accessed by the
users based on new web technology; 3) REST API feature
and documentation for third party. The goals of this paper
are: 1) to provide rich application as a service based on users
personal data log; 2) to bridging the user and third party
such as developers in term of developing applications and
researcher for research based on user personal data; 3) to
develop reliable, available, serviceable and secure sensing as
a service framework.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.4 [Computer Applications]: Social and Behavioral Sci-
ences; C.2.1 [Network Architecture and Design]: Net-
work communications
General Terms
Design, Implementation
Keywords
Sensing as a service, personal data analysis, mobile sensing
1. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, smartphone capability has increased signifi-
cantly. Smartphone has equipped with high processor, bigger
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2701126.2701173.
Deokjai Choi
School of Electrical
Engineering
Chonnam National University
Gwangju, South Korea
dchoi@jnu.ac.kr
memory, bigger storage and etc. With this equipment, smart-
phone has capability to running complex application. Many
sensor also has embedded to the smartphone. With this
sensor and log capability of smartphone, we can develop
many useful system or application in different domain such
as healthcare (elderly monitoring system [1–4], human fall
detection [5–8]) , transportation(monitoring road and traffic
condition) [9, 10], personal and social behavior [11–14], en-
vironmental monitoring(pollution, weather) [15–17] etc. To
develop such system, we have to collect the user personal
data and then analyse it. There are two ways to collect per-
sonal data from the users based on user involvement. First,
participatory sensing and then the second, opportunistic
sensing. Participatory sensing means the application still
need user’s intervention to complete their task. The exam-
ples for such application need user to taking text input for
each time period, taking picture and etc. On the other hand,
opportunistic sensing means application does not need user’s
intervention to complete their task, users not involved in
making decisions instead smart phone itself make decisions
according to the sensed and stored data. In this paper, we
propose concept, design and implementation of sensing as
a service (S2 aaS) framework. The abbreviation of (S2 aaS)
coming from [18] which have present the challenge, solutions
and future directions of sensing as a service.
Research about sensing framework has conducted by many
researcher. Most of the research focus only for one goal.
The research about CRNTC+ [19] focus on health care ap-
plication. Most of sensing framework also based on par-
ticipatory method which need user intervention. UbiqLog
framework [20] is one example of the research based on par-
ticipatory method. In this paper, our contribution are: 1) we
focus on sensing framework development which is can collect
as much as possible personal user data with high quality of
data. 2) The proposed framework is based on opportunistic
method for collecting data because we want to increase user
cosiness. For analyse the data, we focus on unsupervised
learning. 3) This framework can be used for many purposes,
everyone who need personal user data in their research or
their system can use this framework. This framework can be
bridge between user and application developer or researchers.
Our framework consist of three main components: Personal
data collector application based on opportunistic sensing
method, analyse and visualize the data that can be accessed
by the users and REST API that can be used by third party
for research or other authorized application, equipped with
documentation.
 Figure 1: Framework design and architecture

Table 1: List of probes and time period of recording 2.2 Design of S2 aaS Framework
One of the goals of this framework is to provide rich appli-
No. Probes Interval,duration(s)
cation based on user’s personal data and become the bridge
#1 Location(GPS) 300
between user and third party. The concept and design of
#2 Wi-Fi 300
this framework can be seen on Figure 1. Figure 1A shows
#3 Bluetooth 300
how the framework works. First, user have to register to the
#4 Battery 300
web portal. The web portal provide the information about
#5 Call Log 86400
how to use the portal and the link to the senseF application.
#6 SMS Log 86400
senseF application is develop based on opportunistic sensing
#7 Application Installed 86400
method. So after it installed by the user, the application
#8 Hardware Info 86400
will collect the data automatically without intervention from
#9 Contact 86400
the user. This framework support real time analysis. After
#10 Browser Search Log 86400
some amount of user’s personal data is uploaded to the cloud
#11 Browser Bookmark 86400
data server, user can directly see the analysis result of their
#12 Light Sensor 120,0.07
personal data. Figure 1B shows the flow of S2 aaS framework,
#13 Proximity 120,0.07
the details explanation as follows:
#14 Temperature 120,0.07
#15 Accelerometer 120,0.07 1. Application will collect user’s personal data and store
#16 Magnetic Field 120,0.07 it in mobile storage.
#17 Pressure 120,0.07
#18 Activity Log 120,0.07 2. The stored personal data in user’s mobile storage will
#19 Screen Status 120,0.07 automatically uploaded to the cloud data server when
#20 Running Application 120,0.07 the user’s mobile is connect to internet through Wi-Fi.

3. S2 aaS framework provides REST API and documenta-

2. DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION
2.1 Personal Data Collector Application
Before collecting personal data, we need to define what
kind of data that we have to collect. After we define the kind
of data, we can develop or decide the application accordingly.
In this research we did not develop our application from
scratch. We use Funf library1 and we named the application
as senseF. The probes or kind of data that we collected and
the time period of recording can be seen in Table 1. The size
of the data that we can collect is influenced by the activity
of the users. Based on setting in Table 1 users with high
activity can result bigger size data around 1GB each month
and vice versa, the users with less activity will result smaller
size data. We use encryption method (hash) to sensitive data
such as phone number in contact, text message log, phone
call log, and etc.
1
https://code.google.com/p/funf-open-sensing-framework/
tion for third party. This API and documentation can
be used by the developer or the researcher which have
registered to the portal and install the data collector
application. To use personal data that belongs to an-
other user, the developer or researcher have to ask the
permission of the respective user.
4. Third party can register as developer to S2 aaS frame-
work and then they can create new application for
accessing user’s personal data. The authorization be-
tween cloud data server with third party uses OAuth2.
The simple logic OAuth2 flow can be seen on Figure 2.
5. Third party can upload their application to application
store.
6. Then that application can be search and installed by
the user. After user gives the authorization to the
application, the application can access user’s personal
data which had been stored in the cloud data server.
 Figure 2: Simple logic of OAuth flow
7. We use R programming language to analyse user’s
personal data.
8. To provide beautiful, intuitive, responsive and interac-
tive report, we use shiny2 web application framework.
Shiny support and has responsive layout so the layout
will compatible for accessed by different type of devices
(PC, laptop, phone, etc).
9. User can access and see the analysis result from the
portal after login process by using mobile devices or
personal computer.
As explained above, the authorization process based on
OAuth2. This authorization is between cloud data server and
third party. OAuth2 [21] provides a secure authentication to
enable client application to access the resources on behalf of
a resource owner. By using OAuth2, the user could authorize
third party to access their resources (data) without shares
their credentials. OAuth2 was designed to working with
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and allows access
tokens to be issued by the third party using an authorization
server. The third party application uses the token to access
the protected resources that hosted by the resource server
(cloud data server). Figure 2. shows the simple logic of
OAuth2 flow. 1). User uses applications from third party
(original request for resource); 2). Redirect to cloud data
server for authorization; 3). Server domain response the
request by asking authentication from resource owner; 4).
Authenticate is done by the user; 5). Server issues the
token to client application; 6). Client application confirms
the access. In figure, blue cloud means token exchange
and the red cloud means user credentials (username and
password). There is many vendor which has used OAuth2.
The vendors such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, etc.
To detail explanation of OAuth2 authentication process, we
uses TweetDeck application as an example. TweetDeck is the
popular third party of Twitter client application. When we
want to use TweetDeck, we have to authorize this application
to access our data in Twitter. This authorization process
is based on OAuth2. And our S2 aaS framework is adopting
this authorization concept.
2.3 Data Visualization and Analysis
To process and analyse the data, we use R language. R
language is open source, powerful platform for data analysis,
excellent for visualization, large and enthusiastic community.
Our S2 aaS framework uses shiny, one of web application
2
http://shiny.rstudio.com
(a) list of probe and data (b) Activity summary in
in mobile browser mobile browser
(c) Activity summary in PC browser
Figure 3: Example of data report layout opened in
mobile and PC browser
framework which support to turn data analysis into interac-
tive web applications. Shiny is new package from RStudio
that makes the development of interactive web applications
with R is incredibly easy. Figure 3a and 3b show the example
of web layout when opened by using mobile phone browser.
Figure 3c shows the example of web layout using PC browser.
Actually many system or research topics that can be pro-
duced from user personal data, now we still focus on personal
activity and scheduling system such as when users open the
page of daily activity they will see the message likes ”Today,
until now (20:34PM) you have spent your time 3.12 hours
for facebook, kakao talk, and whatsapp application” or likes
”Hai.... you have spent one month in Gwangju, you just in
your dorm and your school, don’t you want to go to some-
where else? I give you the recommendation places: Nami
Island (You’ve never been there), Jeju Island (You have 2
times in there)”.
3. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
This paper is ongoing research paper. We still have many
weakness and limitation. We divide the problem into two
parts.
1. Personal data collector application: Currently, our per-
sonal data collector application only available for an-
droid platform and limited into 20 probes. We have to
expand it into multi-platform and adding more probes.
But adding more probes will increase the storage, pro-
cessing and energy consumption in mobile phone. So
we have to research more deeply to collect the most
valuable user’s personal data with minimum storage,
minimum processing and energy consumption in the
 mobile phone.
2. S2 aaS framework : There are five main problems to
solve in this area. The problems are user’s privacy,
data management and processing (big data issues),
data analysis algorithm, data visualitzation and more
applications based on personal data.
We can see this S2 aaS framework from two points of view,
first from user’s view and the second from researcher and
developers view. From the user’s view, this framework will
increase user’s cosiness about privacy because their personal
data only uploaded to one place and make one agreement with
the cloud data server. When there is an application which
want to access their personal data, have to get authorization
from the user. Moreover, this framework also provides the
analysis result of their personal data with dynamics, intuitive [11] R. D. OLIVEIRA, M. CHERUBINI, and N. OLIVER,
and interactive layout. From the researchers and developers
view, this framework makes it easy for them to developing
application or research the field related to personal data.
They do not need to define and make the application for
collecting personal data by themselves. They can register
and use our framework and then using the REST API to
request the data or another user’s personal data when they
have get the authorization.
4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This research was supported by Basic Science Research
Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea
(NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (2012R1A1A2007014).
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