TYDR - Track Your Daily Routine. Android App for Tracking Smartphone Sensor and Usage Data

TL;DR

TYDR is an Android app designed to collect smartphone sensor and usage data alongside personality questionnaires, aiming to study correlations between device data and personality traits while addressing privacy and ethical considerations.

Contribution

The paper introduces TYDR, an Android app that effectively balances data collection, user engagement, and privacy requirements for psychological research.

Findings

Optimized sensor data tracking balancing data size and battery use

Designed user interface to encourage participation and questionnaire completion

Implemented privacy-preserving data storage compliant with ethical standards

Abstract

We present the Android app TYDR (Track Your Daily Routine) which tracks smartphone sensor and usage data and utilizes standardized psychometric personality questionnaires. With the app, we aim at collecting data for researching correlations between the tracked smartphone data and the user's personality in order to predict personality from smartphone data. In this paper, we highlight our approaches in addressing the challenges in developing such an app. We optimize the tracking of sensor data by assessing the trade-off of size of data and battery consumption and granularity of the stored information. Our user interface is designed to incentivize users to install the app and fill out questionnaires. TYDR processes and visualizes the tracked sensor and usage data as well as the results of the personality questionnaires. When developing an app that will be used in psychological studies, requirements posed by ethics commissions / institutional review boards and data protection officials have to be met. We detail our approaches concerning those requirements regarding the anonymized storing of user data, informing the users about the data collection, and enabling an opt-out option. We present our process for anonymized data storing while still being able to identify individual users who successfully completed a psychological study with the app.