UNLABELLED: The development and validation studies of new multisensory biomarkers and sensor-triggered interventions requires collecting raw sensor data with associated labels in the natural field environment. Unlike platforms for traditional mHealth apps, a software platform for such studies needs to not only support high-rate data ingestion, but also share raw high-rate sensor data with researchers, while supporting high-rate sense-analyze-act functionality in real-time. We present mCerebrum, a realization of such a platform, which supports high-rate data collections from multiple sensors with realtime assessment of data quality. A scalable storage architecture (with near optimal performance) ensures quick response despite rapidly growing data volume. Micro-batching and efficient sharing of data among multiple source and sink apps allows reuse of computations to enable real-time computation of multiple biomarkers without saturating the CPU or memory. Finally, it has a reconfigurable scheduler which manages all prompts to participants that is burden- and context-aware. With a modular design currently spanning 23+ apps, mCerebrum provides a comprehensive ecosystem of system services and utility apps. The design of mCerebrum has evolved during its concurrent use in scientific field studies at ten sites spanning 106,806 person days. Evaluations show that compared with other platforms, mCerebrums architecture and design choices support 1.5 times higher data rates and 4.3 times higher storage throughput, while causing 8.4 times lower CPU usage. CCS CONCEPTS: • Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mobile computing; Ubiquitous and mobile computing systems and tools; • Computer systems organization → Embedded and cyber-physical systems. ACM REFERENCE FORMAT: Syed Monowar Hossain, Timothy Hnat, Nazir Saleheen, Nusrat Jahan Nasrin, Joseph Noor, Bo-Jhang Ho, Tyson Condie, Mani Srivastava, and Santosh Kumar. 2017. mCerebrum: A Mobile Sensing Software Platform for Development and Validation of Digital Biomarkers and Interventions. In Proceedings of SenSys 17, Delft, Netherlands, November 6-8, 2017, 14 pages.

Differential privacy concepts have been successfully used to protect anonymity of individuals in population-scale analysis. Sharing of mobile sensor data, especially physiological data, raise different privacy challenges, that of protecting private behaviors that can be revealed from time series of sensor data. Existing privacy mechanisms rely on noise addition and data perturbation. But the accuracy requirement on inferences drawn from physiological data, together with well-established limits within which these data values occur, render traditional privacy mechanisms inapplicable. In this work, we define a new behavioral privacy metric based on differential privacy and propose a novel data substitution mechanism to protect behavioral privacy. We evaluate the efficacy of our scheme using 660 hours of ECG, respiration, and activity data collected from 43 participants and demonstrate that it is possible to retain meaningful utility, in terms of inference accuracy (90%), while simultaneously preserving the privacy of sensitive behaviors.