Poor Android data quality

Data & Analysis
1

Hi everyone,

we’ve been testing LAMP on and off for about 3 years now with our school team at the CTU FEE in Prague. So far we’ve seen a noticeable difference between iOS and Android data quality. iOS seems to work fine, the data comes in regularly and the data quality is good. But Android on the other hand is very bad. We’ve tested numerous devices from different brands over the years (Samsung, Xiaomi, RealMe, Huawei) and all of them perform very poorly. The data quality is very poor (if anything comes in at all) and after few hours the data stops coming altogether. We’ve tried numerous things to fix this, such as:

  • Reinstalling the app
  • Logging in and out
  • Making sure the phone is on WiFi and has everything allowed in settings (access to all sensors etc.)
  • Not using battery saving mode

but none of these steps help. Are we doing something wrong, or is this common? Because as it stands, using Android devices for data collection is useless.

Thanks for your replies.

2

Hello,

MindLAMP has changed greatly in the last 3 years so perhaps you want to run the most recent versions as a next step. To get higher quality passive data, you likely need some form of active data or engagement as well. But overall other teams are getting Android data so the good news is that it is possible. Do keep us updated.

Best,
John

3

Hi John,

thanks for your quick reply.

I’ve updated the LAMP server to the latest version and we’ve had some time to enroll more Android devices and test the data quality more thoroughly.

The best representation of our results are graphs attached below. To keep it as simple as possible, I am only attaching two graphs from May, but the results on other Android/iOS devices and over a longer time period are very similar in our testing.

The graphs represent the amount of data for the accelerometer sensor that have been received over a given time period, graphed over every hour. As you can see, for participant U6769391717 the data quality is almost perfect with virtually no outages. This is typical for iOS devices in our testing. Participant U7288384208 has quite a few data outages. This is also typical in our testing for Android devices.

The data quality on Android definitely improved quite a bit after the update, but it is still lagging behind the iOS data quality. This is true for many Android phones of varying brands and OS versions.

Based on these graphs, are our results expected or do we have some issue with our server?

Thanks a lot,
Luke

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data_amount_U7288384208
data_amount_U72883842084000×1927 53.8 KB

4

It is hard to know by looking at these two. Data quality controls and processes for Android phones are equally important to server processes, so I would look there as a next step. Some older versions of Android do offer less data, but that often varies by phone type and age as well so it is not easy to pinpoint. As you will notice, we also have updated versions of the apps as well so running those will also help.

Best,
John

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