A smart agent guided contactless data collection system amid a pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted academic life in different ways. In the mobile and pervasive computing community, there was a struggle on data collection for the evaluation of human-sensing systems. An automated and contactless solution to collect data from users at home is one way that can help in the continuation of user-centric studies. In this poster, we present a portable system for remote, in-home data collection. The system is powered by a Raspberry Pi© and input peripherals (a camera, a microphone, and a wireless receiver). Our system uses a speech interface for text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversions. The system acts as a voice-based "smart agent" that guides the user during an experiment session. We aim to use our system to collect data from a set of smart pill bottles that we previously designed for medication adherence monitoring [1] and user identification [3].