Integrating Sensors in a Mobile Application Authoring Environment

Authoring systems attempt to capitalize on the expertise of different domains towards in creating digital content to serve a determined demographic. Existing frameworks and systems enable non-expert programmers to create their own mobile applications with mild effort. Despite a certain range of diversity in this area, little relevance has been given towards capitalizing on all features of the targeted operating systems and / or devices. This paper presents the extension of DETACH – an authoring tool for Android mobile applications – with a set of features which enable non-expert programmers to access device sensor data with relative ease. Supported sensors encompass the chronometer, accelerometer, GPS and a set of third-party physiological sensors. In this report, we focus on the renewed system architecture, emphasizing the steps to add new sensors, the application deployment process and how sensor data is retrieved and evaluated to trigger behaviours in the developed applications.