BioShare : a research tool for analysing social networks effects when sharing biometric data

Abstract

Sharing Biometric data such as heart rate over social networks is gaining popularity as applications such as Runkeeper, Azumio and Nike+ provide free services that allow users to share this data online. Yet research on the effects that sharing this very personal data has, is negligible. To facilitate research in this area we developed BioShare; an open source tool designed for researching the effect that sharing biometric data over social networks has on the network and its actors. The development follows a series of data collection phases using a multi-method approach for capturing researchers’ requirements. The implementation provides 3 key features. 1: it allows the capturing and sharing of biometric and locative data to social networks, 2: it allows the data viewers to send feedback to the data-sharing users in real-time and 3: it logs the user interaction with the system for post-experiment analysis. BioShare is designed for adaptability such that it allows the researchers to configure the system for different experimental contexts. The tool also provides measurement points for comparing user engagement and present different data types and visualizations to participant control and experimental groups.