CenceMe - Injecting Sensing Presence into Social Networking Applications

We present the design, prototype implementation, and evaluation of CenceMe, a personal sensing system that enables members of social networks to share their sensing presence with their buddies in a secure manner. Sensing presence captures a user’s status in terms of his activity (e.g., sitting, walking, meeting friends), disposition (e.g., happy, sad, doing OK), habits (e.g., at the gym, coffee shop today, at work) and surroundings (e.g., noisy, hot, bright, high ozone). CenceMe injects sensing presence into popular social networking applications such as Facebook, MySpace, and IM (Skype, Pidgin) allowing for new levels of “connection” and implicit communication (albeit non-verbal) between friends in social networks. The CenceMe system is implemented, in part, as a thin-client on a number of standard and sensor-enabled cell phones and offers a number of services, which can be activated on a per-buddy basis to expose different degrees of a user’s sensing presence; these services include, life patterns, my presence, friend feeds, social interaction, significant places, buddy search, buddy beacon, and “above average?”