Mobile Sensing Methods

Abstract

Mobile and wearable devices are equipped with an array of embedded digital sensors that produce continuous steams of digital trace data. These now effectively ubiquitous digital trace data can empower psychologists to study human behavior “in vivo” and “in situ,” which has been an important goal following the American Psychology Association’s “Decade of Behavior” (2000-2009). As a result, there is currently great excitement among psychological scientists about the potentials that sensor-based mobile technologies offer for studying everyday situations and behavior ecologically and at scale. This novel approach to field research is commonly referred to as mobile sensing, or passive sensing. In this chapter we retrace mobile sensing’s journey in social and personality psychology. We begin with briefly reviewing forces that helped pave the way for mobile sensing’s warm welcome in the field. In the second and third part, we provide an overview of the current use of mobile sensing in social and personality psychology and convey a very basic how-to. Finally, we end the chapter with a discussion of where we think mobile sensing currently stands and identify some possible future directions.