Sesnse 360 Invisible Hackathon: Overview of Sense 360
Author: Tamara G
This past weekend the Sense 360 team hosted “The Invisible hackathon iOS”. “Invisible Apps are apps that live in the background, anticipating our needs based on sensor and contextual data, and do things for us before we even have to ask”.
What is Sense 360 and how can this technology help us develop invisible apps?
Sense 360 technology can be integrated with your app to track when a user arrives or departs from a specific location.
The main structure is a recipe which wraps four items: triggers, cooldown, time window and Recipe Fire delegate.
Trigger: This is the marker that will indicate when to take action on a met condition. Within triggers there are:
- POI (Places of Interest): These can be restaurants, bars, libraries, parks etc
- Custom Geofence: Is an area determined by a middle point along with a group of longitude and latitude points. Sense 360 allows about a thousand geofences and they can be as small as 20 meters.
- Personal places: These are home, work and other personal set locations.
Cooldown is another key element of the recipe; it determines how often the recipe is fired (minutes, hours, days, etc). The time window specifies which hours of the day a recipe is fired. If you wish to set the time window to be lunchtime you can block the time from 11 am to 2 pm every day. RecipieFireDelegate is the area where you establish the piece of code that will be executed once the recipe is triggered.
Sense 360 is a low energy focused solution, combining a number of location APIs the software is smart to only use the minimum requirements to correctly operate preventing battery drainage. In addition to battery life, Sense 360 focused on privacy. The specific location information is not saved in the servers but instead is in the user’s phone.
There is a 5 minute delay to identify where the user is located, the Sense 360 team is working on lowering the delay to give a close to real time feedback.
The framework includes a unit test environment. With the Xcode GPS file one can simulate the users location and trigger the desired tests. In addition, it also provides debug notification which saves you from having to interact directly with the application.
A great feature of Sense 360 is their code generator. This tool provides you with sample code ready to be used and tested. It will highlight key parts of the code which will help you understand how to customize your code.
