Habitsourcing: Sensing The Environment Through Immersive, Habit-Building Experiences

Citizen science and communitysensing applications allow everyday citizens to collect data about the physical world to benefit science and society. Yet despite successes, current approaches are still limited by the number of domain-interested volunteers who are willing and able to contribute useful data. In this paper we introduce habitsourcing, an alternative approach that harnesses the habit-building practices of millions of people to collect environmental data. To support the design and development of habitsourcing apps, we present (1) interaction techniques and design principles for sensing through actuation, a method for acquiring sensing data from cued interactions; and (2) ExperienceKit, an iOS library that makes it easy for developers to build and test habitsourcing applications. In two experiments, we show that our two proof-of-concept apps, ZenWalk and Zombies Interactive, compare favorably to their non-data collecting counterparts, and that we can effectively extract environmental data using simple detection techniques.