Assigning Group Activity Semantics to Multi-Device Mobile Sensor Data: An Explanation-Based Perspective

Numerous types of sensor data can be gathered via devices on mobile sensors, such as smartphones and smartwatches as well as things endowed with sensors. Such sensor data from disparate sources can be aggregated and inferences can be made about the user, the user’s physical activities as well as the physical activities of the group the user is part of. A perspective on this is that the group’s physical activity becomes an explanation for the sensor readings now obtained from this set of sensors. This paper proposes an explanation-based perspective on reasoning about multi-device sensor data, and describes a framework called GroupSense that prototypes this idea.