AIRS Released as an Android Version of NORS

NORS has been an effort of mine for some years now, establishing a mobile-centric sensing platform that allows for gathering a large variety of phone and sensor information through the mobile phone.

However, MIDP as a Java platform is less and less common in modern smartphones – Android as well as iOS did not adopt MIDP but their own platforms while the future of Symbian phones is well-known. With that, a MIDP-based platform made less and less sense.

Hence, I decided to invest the time to port NORS to Android. I chose Android over iOS due to its openness compared to iOS and the feature richness. As it turned out, the porting of core features of NORS (such as the event distribution engine) was extremely fast since Android is utilizing Java for development. Only the GUI and the workings of background sensing needed Android-specific implementation.

The result of these efforts has finally been released: AIRS (Android Remote Sensing)!

It is now available as an open source project on Github as well as a packaged application on the Android market! Its current version supports more than 45 sensors of various kinds, including call logs, received SMSs, orientation, light, GPS, and many more.

On this site, you can also find an online manual, which I will update as AIRS will develop. Do look through the manual if you want to understand how it works. And of course, try out AIRS and send me feedback for feature requests and bug reports!

And NORS? Well, it’s open source so anybody can develop it further. But I will concentrate my future efforts on AIRS so that NORS is likely to be discontinued.