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Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Procedia Computer Science 198 (2022) 203–210
1877-0509 © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)
Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Program Chairs
10.1016/j.procs.2021.12.229
10.1016/j.procs.2021.12.229 1877-0509
© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)
Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Program Chairs
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Procedia Computer Science 00 (2018) 000–000
www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia
The 11th International Conference on Current and Future Trends of Information and
Communication Technologies in Healthcare (ICTH 2021)
November 1-4, 2021, Leuven, Belgium
LAMP: a monitoring framework for mHealth application research
Michael Stacha,, Florian Pfl¨
ugera, Manfred Reicherta,R
¨
udiger Pryssb
aInstitute of Databases and Information Systems, Ulm University, Germany
bInstitute of Clinical Epidemiology and Biometry, University of W¨urzburg, Germany
Abstract
The usage of mobile applications in healthcare has gained popularity in recent years. In 2018, at least, 10,000 apps related to mental
health could be downloaded in the app stores. The popularity of healthcare apps, especially in the field of mental health, is based on
in their simplicity in large-scale data collection scenarios used for the improvement of health-related services or research. For these
apps, instruments to quantify the quality of an app and repositories for app quality ratings have emerged in recent years. What is
rarely considered, however, is the degree of functional correctness of an app, which can have a serious impact on the data collection
process and thus on data quality. The increasing restrictions of background services are a challenge for app developers, who need
to implement recurring tasks reliably in the background, like the collection of longitudinal data based on questionnaires or sensor
measurements. In this paper, we present a monitoring framework to investigate the degree of functional correctness regarding the
background service implementation of apps based on notification events. With this framework, we want to enable the large-scale
collection of app execution data in the wild to gain more insights into the execution of apps in different execution environments
and configurations. The gained knowledge shall help to improve existing applications in the field of mental health and eventually
to improve the degree of functional correctness of those apps.
©2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Program Chairs.
Keywords: mHealth; Digital Phenotyping; Mobile Crowdsensing; Ecological Momentary Assessment; App Monitoring; Notification
1. Introduction
The digitization of healthcare has been advancing for years. Recently, caused by the COVID 19 pandemic, this
trend has received a further boost. Every day, over 200 additional apps are being added to the existing basis of over
300,000 apps that are available in the two major app stores (i.e., Google Play Store and Apple App Store) [6,11].
mHealth apps (i.e., apps for healthcare purposes) make up an ever-increasing share of this app repository, as the
Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 731 50 24 225 ; fax: +49 731 50 24 134.
E-mail address: [email protected]
1877-0509 ©2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Program Chairs.
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Procedia Computer Science 00 (2018) 000–000
www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia
The 11th International Conference on Current and Future Trends of Information and
Communication Technologies in Healthcare (ICTH 2021)
November 1-4, 2021, Leuven, Belgium
LAMP: a monitoring framework for mHealth application research
Michael Stacha,, Florian Pfl¨
ugera, Manfred Reicherta,R
¨
udiger Pryssb
aInstitute of Databases and Information Systems, Ulm University, Germany
bInstitute of Clinical Epidemiology and Biometry, University of W¨urzburg, Germany
Abstract
The usage of mobile applications in healthcare has gained popularity in recent years. In 2018, at least, 10,000 apps related to mental
health could be downloaded in the app stores. The popularity of healthcare apps, especially in the field of mental health, is based on
in their simplicity in large-scale data collection scenarios used for the improvement of health-related services or research. For these
apps, instruments to quantify the quality of an app and repositories for app quality ratings have emerged in recent years. What is
rarely considered, however, is the degree of functional correctness of an app, which can have a serious impact on the data collection
process and thus on data quality. The increasing restrictions of background services are a challenge for app developers, who need
to implement recurring tasks reliably in the background, like the collection of longitudinal data based on questionnaires or sensor
measurements. In this paper, we present a monitoring framework to investigate the degree of functional correctness regarding the
background service implementation of apps based on notification events. With this framework, we want to enable the large-scale
collection of app execution data in the wild to gain more insights into the execution of apps in different execution environments
and configurations. The gained knowledge shall help to improve existing applications in the field of mental health and eventually
to improve the degree of functional correctness of those apps.
©2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Program Chairs.
Keywords: mHealth; Digital Phenotyping; Mobile Crowdsensing; Ecological Momentary Assessment; App Monitoring; Notification
1. Introduction
The digitization of healthcare has been advancing for years. Recently, caused by the COVID 19 pandemic, this
trend has received a further boost. Every day, over 200 additional apps are being added to the existing basis of over
300,000 apps that are available in the two major app stores (i.e., Google Play Store and Apple App Store) [6,11].
mHealth apps (i.e., apps for healthcare purposes) make up an ever-increasing share of this app repository, as the
Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 731 50 24 225 ; fax: +49 731 50 24 134.
E-mail address: [email protected]
1877-0509 ©2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Program Chairs.
204 Michael Stach et al. / Procedia Computer Science 198 (2022) 203–210
2M. Stach et al. /Procedia Computer Science 00 (2018) 000–000
diverse capabilities of smartphones for data collection has shown to be highly effective [4]. For example, in 2018,
there were at least 10,000 apps related to mental health in the app stores [22].
Regarding the increasing number of apps in the stores, the demand for apps with a better quality has emerged. The
two major stores make great efforts to review new apps before they are published in the store, with most of the reviews
being related to possible violations of the store’s terms and conditions. A content review, in turn, would exceed the
testing resources of the store operators given the large number of apps in the stores. Since content review of mHealth
applications is of general interest to both the app users and researchers as well as practitioners, app quality review
instruments (e.g., in the form of standardized questionnaires) have emerged in various areas. Regarding mHealth,
instruments like the app evaluation model of the American Psychological Association [1], the Evaluation Tool for
Mobile and Web-Based eHealth Interventions (ENLIGHT) [2,19], or the Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS) [18]
and its German version (MARS-G) [12] were therefore developed. Since the latter instruments are mainly used in
a research context, platforms like the Mobile Health App Database (MHAD)[16] try to collate app quality ratings
and present the results to a broader audience. These efforts are intended to assist end users in selecting appropriate
mHealth apps based on app quality ratings by domain experts.
Interestingly, much of the research related to app quality has focused on app content ratings. Research related to
the implementation quality of the app (i.e., the implementation and execution of the app, including all of its features
and services, in line with expectations and requirements) has been the subject of only a few works, although various
quality models already exist in the field of software engineering. The Systems and Software Quality Requirements and
Evaluation (SQuaRE), for example, is part of the ISO/IEC 25010 standard family [7] and provides a product quality
model that defines aspects of external and internal quality of software products. With respect to the implementation
quality of apps, SQuaRE offers the characteristic functional suitability with the sub-characteristic functional correct-
ness, which is defined ”as the degree to which a product or system offers correct results, with the required degree
of precision” [14]. When we use the term software product quality in the following, we refer to the definition of the
functional correctness characteristic of the SQuaRE product quality model.
In existing research projects of the authors, which pose an intensive app use (e.g., TrackYourTinnitus [10] or Corona
Health [3]), we were able to determine that apps on various devices with different Android versions or configurations
led to different behavior. The latter affected the app’s functionalities, for example, by not correctly executing back-
ground services like GPS tracking or receiving notifications from server applications. Since the mental health research
method used in the aforementioned projects requires reliable adherence to data collection schedules, a high degree
of software product quality is crucial to data quality. Especially when using modern research methods like Digital
Phenotyping that heavily depend on smartphone-based data collection, various requirements have to be considered.
As there is a plethora of different smartphone configurations (e.g., hardware, OS version, OS vendor, user settings,
etc.), creating a generalizable view on this topic requires a monitoring approach that is both versatile and suitable for
large-scale use. In this work, we want to present LAMP: a configurable monitoring framework for large-scale mHealth
application research. With LAMP, we want to investigate the behavior of smartphone apps in the wild in order to gain
insights into the execution of Android apps. The framework is designed to host multiple large-scale studies (including
automated data reporting) and with a focus on low resource consumption and data minimization. Eventually, LAMP
shall help practitioners and developers to design high quality mHealth apps.
The remainder of this work is structured as follows: In Section 2, background information regarding the app execu-
tion on Android as well as related work are described. Subsequently, the proposed framework, including a prototypical
implementation, is presented in Section 3. Section 4gives insights into the evaluation of the prototype. Finally, the
work concludes with a summary and outlook in Section 5.
2. Background & Related Work
The use of mobile apps in healthcare is widespread. Often, data are collected in order to subsequently evaluate,
interpret, and provide some form of value to the data creators (e.g., providing better treatments). In the area of mental
health, for example, apps and sensor technology are often used to perform a Digital Phenotyping [8]. Torous et al.
define Digital Phenotyping as ”moment-by-moment quantification of the individual-level human phenotype in-situ
using data from smartphones and other personal digital devices. [19]. To achieve this, mobile sensing methods (e.g.,
Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS)) are often used in combination with other research methods. An appropriate research
Michael Stach et al. / Procedia Computer Science 198 (2022) 203–210 205
M. Stach et al. /Procedia Computer Science 00 (2018) 000–000 3
method to achieve both the ”moment-by-moment” and the ”in situ” aspects of the Torous et al. definition of Digital
Phenotyping is called Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA). The latter is more common in the research environ-
ment of psychology and describes the periodic measurement of individuals’ experience, behavior, and psychological
and physical well-being [15]. The combination of EMA and MCS [9] has shown its potential for research in healthcare
in various studies [10,17,3].
According to Smyth et al., measurements using the EMA can increase data quality by reducing the recall bias,
increase ecological validity, and track processes that occur within the individual [15]. To achieve this, the user must
be prompted to collect data at a time unknown to him/her or, if no user interaction is required, the app must be notified
to start collecting data in the background. Since notifications (i.e., messages that are display by the OS to provide
reminders or other timely information) are crucial for studies with complex, intertwined notification schedules, it is
worth taking a closer look at the limitations of the operating systems and app execution in general.
Operating system features and interfaces are subject to constant changes. Changes to the behavior of an API or
operating system services can be error-prone for all those apps that have not yet been tested for a new operating
system version. Petter et al. [13] describe in their work the behavioral change of their MCS app with different Android
versions. They further describe that the background data collection was affected by the introduction of various energy
saving features like the Doze Mode and App Standby in Android version 6. The Doze Mode is activated when an
Android smartphone is both unused for a longer period and unplugged from the power supply. While Doze Mode
defers all background activities (OS services excluded) to a recurring so-called ”maintenance window”, App Standby
restricts background network activity of infrequently used apps. Problems with these OS-related restrictions regarding
background services where reported in [21]. In the latter, vendor-specific operating system adjustments like the energy-
saving mode had such an impact on the data collection that those data sets had to be excluded from the data analysis.
Regarding the complexity of modern smartphone OS, app developers must know about these issues to ensure a high
degree of software product quality. Surprisingly, according to [5], there is a certain amount of unawareness in the open
source developer community about operating system internal mechanisms that affect the execution of background
services. Since background services are crucial in the light of mHealth apps, this topic should be explored further.
In order to monitor notifications on Android devices, Weber et al. presented an approach [20] to record the entire
notification history of a device. However, unlike this paper, notifications must be uploaded manually. Another short-
coming is that there is no option to exclude apps. Consequently, sensitive data (e.g., instant messaging content like
texts or images) might be included in the data set as well.
3. Large-scale Application Monitoring Platform
In order to explore the impact of operating system constraints due to background service restrictions, a framework
was developed to study OS events (e.g., notifications) on mobile devices. This framework shall be used to (1) gain
more insights into the software product quality of apps in general (with a focus on the investigation of mHealth apps)
and (2) serve as platform for notification-related studies. In order to investigate app behavior in the wild, the proposed
framework should address the following requirements based on the challenges described in Section 2:
Filtered Notification Listener (RQ1): The framework should be implemented with data minimization and privacy in mind. Sen-
sitive data must not be collected unless this is part of the study.
Additional (Sensor) Information (RQ2): It should be possible to optionally collect (sensor) data, such as location, movement,
user settings, and capabilities of the device.
Study Configuration & Agreement (RQ3): Data should not be automatically collected before entering a study. The latter should
be configurable. Furthermore, there must be an agreement between the user and the study organizer about the collected data.
Both the agreement and the collected data should be visible to the user.
Low Energy Consumption (RQ4): Since the app may be whitelisted to avoid being affected by the OS’s energy-saving measures,
the app should implement energy-saving functions while maintaining a high quality of services.
Automated Reporting (RQ5): Study organizers should always have insights into the status of their studies. In addition, they
should be able to create individual dashboards and data reports.
Scalability (RQ6): To address the plethora of different smartphone configurations, the entire framework and all included compo-
nents should be able to scale to allow different types of studies at the same level of quality.
206 Michael Stach et al. / Procedia Computer Science 198 (2022) 203–210
4M. Stach et al. /Procedia Computer Science 00 (2018) 000–000
Background Services
Notification
Listener
Service
Work-/Alarm-
Manager
Mobile Application Reporting
OLTP-optimized
Data Store
Device Information
Management
Battery Screen
SoundConnectivity
MovementLocation
Data Management
Local Data
Repository
Batch
Transmission
Service
Configuration & Token
Management
Token
Validation
Configuration
Validation
Filter & OS
Capabilities
User
Settings
Data Exchange
Manager
Customizable
Dashboard
Extract
Load
Transform
Plotting & Data
Exploration
OLAP-optimized
Data Store
Scalable Backend API
Session Management
Token Managment
Data Collection
Platform Configuration
Entity Mangement
Participant
App Data
Study
Configuration
Data Repository
Configurable User Interface
Fig. 1. Overview of the LAMP framework components.
3.1. Framework
The proposed framework, which is named LAMP, is depicted in Fig. 1. All components are directly or indirectly
connected (either uni- or bidirectionally) to a central database service, following the single source of truth (SSOT)
principle. Since the centralization of the database generates high workload, this component must be OLTP-optimized
(RQ6). To fulfil RQ1, the app must be able to process the study configuration, validate the latter, and compare it with
the capabilities of the device (see Fig. 1, ”Configuration & Token Management”). Furthermore, having RQ4 in mind,
all background services are implemented as workers. In case of older OS versions, other scheduling methods are
utilized. Choosing batch transmission whenever possible as data exchange method further decreases network traffic
(RQ4). Additional (sensor) information (RQ2) are implemented as a separate module (see Fig. 1, ”Device Information
Management”) depending on the devices capabilities.
To create a configurable study environment, data collections can be configured dynamically. Users can partici-
pate in a study via a generated token and must subsequently agree to the study configuration (RQ3). To respond to
changing configurations, the app should periodically check for changes. Once a change is detected, the updated study
configuration must be confirmed again.
Automatic report generation has to be implemented using a data warehouse platform (RQ5), which allows for
a sophisticated data analysis. Having CPU-intensive, analytical queries in mind, an ETL1worker is to be executed
periodically, which transfers the data into a separate OLAP-optimized data store.
3.2. Prototype
In this section, the prototypical implementation of the framework is presented. This proof-of-concept prototype
implements an Android application to enlighten the behavior of apps regarding the notification service as well as
constitute a platform for app usage studies. An overview of the implementation is depicted in Fig. 2.
The document-oriented NoSQL database MongoDB was used as OLTP-optimized data store. To take advantage
of the JSON-based document model, NodeJS was used to develop a scalable backend API. The NodeJS event loop
enables a high number of requests by processing the latter asynchronously and is therefore suitable for processing the
app data.
1ETL stands for ”Extract”, ”Transform” and ”Load”
Michael Stach et al. / Procedia Computer Science 198 (2022) 203–210 207
M. Stach et al. /Procedia Computer Science 00 (2018) 000–000 5
Participant
Android
Application
NodeJS
RESTful API
Single
Source of
Truth
Study
Configuration
Device
Measurements
Periodic Synchronisation
MongoDB NodeJS
Background Worker
MySQL Apache
Superset
Dashboard
Configuration
NodeJS
Management UI
CRUD
Entities
10
Min
Study OwnerSystem Admin
Fig. 2. The LAMP platform at a glance.
The Android app was developed using Java. Users can join studies (called ”surveys” in the UI) by entering a token
or scan a QR code containing the token. The latter is a UUID2, automatically generated when creating the participant
for a specific study. In the app settings, users can enable or disable location- and movement-based information as well
as WiFi information. Consequently, users cannot join studies that require this information. In the notifications tab, a
list of recorded notifications is displayed (see Fig. 3). To view detailed information about a notification record, the
user must tap on the corresponding list entry.
The management UI, also implemented in NodeJS, allows the configuration of studies, participants, and users
in general. In addition, the collected measurements can be displayed. The latter is loaded into the reporting tool in
ten-minute intervals. Any updates due to dropouts are also matched. The pre-configured dashboard for each study is
depicted in Fig. 4. It consists of seven widgets that give real-time insights into a study.
Fig. 3. App: notifications tab Fig. 4. Pre-configured dashboard (map view was censored due to privacy)
2UUID stands for ”Universally Unique Identifier”
208 Michael Stach et al. / Procedia Computer Science 198 (2022) 203–210
6M. Stach et al. /Procedia Computer Science 00 (2018) 000–000
4. Evaluation
The proof-of-concept prototype is still in the development phase. Since the resulting framework will be used
for scientific measurements, an evaluation of the approach is mandatory. Through a practical evaluation setting, the
functionality of the implementation regarding the requirements and the conceptional considerations of the framework
is reviewed. The following evaluation is not a complete evaluation of the entire system, but is to be seen as a test run
on a small scale. In this evaluation, the reliability of the worker-based implementation of the app background services
and the batch transmission of measurements were checked in addition to the general functionality.
For the evaluation, the Nokia 7.2 smartphone with stock Android (i.e., Android One in version 10, SDK 29) was
used. The app ”Track & Graph”3was used to develop a comparable schedule to an longitudinal data collection app
(e.g., EMA-based MCS app). ”Track & Graph” is an application to collect longitudinal personal data and to create
charts based on the latter. On the backend side, all applications were deployed in a container environment, with 4
CPU cores and 16 GB of RAM. There were to be 3 notifications sent out daily for 5 days at 10am, 12pm, and 2pm
(with the exception of May 13, 2021, as this was a public holiday in Germany). Every day at 4pm, the device was
powered offand powered on the next day at 8am. The smartphone was used between notification events only to answer
questionnaires. Internet access was alternately turned on and off. To perform the measurement under more realistic
conditions, energy-saving operating system modes (see Section 2) were activated by removing the power supply and
longer periods of no smartphone activity. The measured data points are shown in Table 1.
The salient aspect to evaluate the above framework requirements is the difference between the notification event
on the smartphone and the system time in the backend after processing the notification records (insertion delay).
3GitHub Repository: https://github.com/SamAmco/track-and-graph
Table 1. Data of the practical evaluation setting.
ID Event Type System Time (Phone) UTC Offset System Time (Backend)* SDK** Bat. Status Bat. Level Connection
1 posted 2021-05-10 10:00:44 7200000 2021-05-10 12:13:30 29 discharging 70 wifi
2 clicked 2021-05-10 10:13:32 7200000 2021-05-10 14:09:40 29 discharging 70 wifi
3 posted 2021-05-10 12:09:49 7200000 2021-05-11 12:08:07 29 discharging 69 none
4 clicked 2021-05-10 12:09:55 7200000 2021-05-11 12:08:07 29 discharging 69 none
5 posted 2021-05-10 14:04:11 7200000 2021-05-11 12:08:07 29 discharging 68 none
6 clicked 2021-05-10 14:04:15 7200000 2021-05-11 12:08:07 29 discharging 68 none
7 posted 2021-05-11 10:04:20 7200000 2021-05-11 12:08:07 29 discharging 68 none
8 clicked 2021-05-11 10:04:26 7200000 2021-05-11 12:08:07 29 discharging 68 none
9 posted 2021-05-11 12:24:45 7200000 2021-05-11 17:44:04 29 discharging 67 none
10 clicked 2021-05-11 12:24:48 7200000 2021-05-11 17:44:04 29 discharging 67 none
11 posted 2021-05-11 15:43:47 7200000 2021-05-11 17:44:04 29 discharging 66 none
12 clicked 2021-05-11 15:44:00 7200000 2021-05-11 17:44:04 29 discharging 66 none
13 posted 2021-05-12 08:00:12 7200000 2021-05-12 10:18:03 29 discharging 63 wifi
14 clicked 2021-05-12 08:18:05 7200000 2021-05-13 11:28:54 29 discharging 63 wifi
15 posted 2021-05-12 11:07:38 7200000 2021-05-13 11:28:54 29 discharging 63 none
16 clicked 2021-05-12 11:07:40 7200000 2021-05-13 11:28:54 29 discharging 63 none
17 posted 2021-05-12 12:00:41 7200000 2021-05-13 11:28:54 29 discharging 63 none
18 clicked 2021-05-12 12:55:30 7200000 2021-05-13 11:28:54 29 discharging 63 none
19 posted 2021-05-12 14:00:40 7200000 2021-05-13 11:28:54 29 discharging 62 none
20 clicked 2021-05-12 14:00:49 7200000 2021-05-13 11:28:54 29 discharging 62 none
21 posted 2021-05-14 08:09:09 7200000 2021-05-14 10:28:53 29 discharging 57 wifi
22 clicked 2021-05-14 08:09:14 7200000 2021-05-14 10:28:53 29 discharging 57 wifi
23 posted 2021-05-14 10:02:11 7200000 2021-05-14 13:54:34 29 discharging 56 wifi
24 clicked 2021-05-14 12:14:28 7200000 2021-05-14 14:14:33 29 discharging 55 wifi
* Time at which the data record is processed by the backend. The UTC offset of the smartphone (i.e., time zone) is included.
** Refers to the software development kit version of the Android app.
Michael Stach et al. / Procedia Computer Science 198 (2022) 203–210 209
M. Stach et al. /Procedia Computer Science 00 (2018) 000–000 7
Table 2. Descriptive statistics on the evaluation data (in hours).
Connection Mean Median First Quartile Third Quartile Standard Deviation Range Minimum Maximum Count
All 10,278 3,322 0,276 20,785 10,509 25,179 0,001 25,18 24
WiFi 3,77 0,328 0,276 1,889 8,685 25,179 0,001 25,18 8
None 13,532 19,768 2,507 21,595 10,013 22,353 0,001 22,354 16
all
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
hours
Fig. 5. Insertion delay: entire data set
wifi
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
hours
Fig. 6. Insertion delay: WiFi-enabled
none
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
hours
Fig. 7. Insertion delay: offline
The calculated insertion delays for the evaluation data, grouped in connection types, are illustrated in the box plots
in Fig. 5-7. Descriptive statistics on the data sets are given in Table 2. While the standard deviation is relatively
comparable in the data sets, both median and the third quartiles show larger deviations. These can be explained by
both the alternating WiFi and the phases in the offstate (4pm to 8am). With regard to the entire data set, both the
overall system and the aforementioned energy-saving feature appear to be working.
We are currently preparing an evaluation to measure the remaining requirements such as system performance.
Multiple devices will be used for this study to provide more meaningful results. Note that the performance aspect was
not part of evaluation at hand.
5. Summary & Outlook
In this paper, we described the problem of lacking software product quality of mHealth apps due to OS-related
restrictions introduced in recent OS versions (e.g., Doze Mode or App Standby in Android). In addition, we presented
the need for reliable background services and their impact on data collection. We furthermore have elaborated the
previously underestimated dimension of software product quality of mHealth apps that should be researched more
intensively in the future. To tackle this issue, we presented requirements for a platform that is able to investigate the
impact of background service limitations based on notification events. We created the LAMP framework that meets
the analyzed requirements, while putting also a special emphasis on data and energy conservation. An implementation
as proof-of-concept prototype, which serves as a research platform for further research was presented as well. LAMP
was subsequently tested in a practical evaluation. In future work, LAMP will be evaluated in more detail. Currently,
only an Android version of LAMP is available. An iOS version is in development in order to be able to perform data
collection on both operating systems.
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