Cooperative Smartphone Tracking System: Software Design and Implementation

Mobile applications have been increasingly adopted in monitoring and tracking systems such as health tracking systems for elderly and chronic patients. Due to the ubiquitous nature of smartphones, using smartphones in such tracking systems would be time and cost-effective. However, the limited battery capacity in smartphones could cause an interruption in reporting the tracking information, especially when users spend a long time without recharging batteries. Continuous tracking could be critically important, especially for the elderly and patients with serious illnesses. In this paper, we develop a mobile application for Android smartphones that report the location and health information cooperatively using the CEET clustering protocol. On the server-side, we exploited the Google Firebase real database that receives the users’ tracking information and can notify the data changes within milliseconds. We present a performance evaluation of the system through real experiments using the developed application. The results show the outstanding performance of the proposed approach in reducing the tracking energy (by around 55%). The developed app does not require any modification neither to the manufacturing specifications of the smartphones nor to the established wireless environment. The user just needs to install the app to his/her smartphones using apk file or from the Google play.