In PSLab android app we have implemented sensor data fetching of various sensors inbuilt in the mobile device like light sensor, accelerometer, gyrometer. We can use PSLab to log the data and show in the form of the graph or maybe export the data in the form of CSV format for future use.

But recording data from the phone sensor imposes a serious problem in the performance of the Android app as it is a costly to process in terms of memory, resources and time. In CS terms there is too much work that has to be done on the single main thread which sometimes leads to lag and compromises the UX.

So as a solution we applied a concept of the Multithreading provided by Java in which we can shift the heavy process to a separate background thread so that the main thread never gets interrupted during fetching the sensor data and the background thread handles all the fetching and updates the UI as soon as it gets the data, till then the Main thread continues to serves the user so to user the application remains always responsive.

For implementing this we used a special class provided by Android Framework called AsyncTask. Which provides below methods:-

• doInBackground() : This method contains the code which needs to be executed in the background. In this method, we can send results multiple times to the UI thread by publishProgress() method.

• onPreExecute() : This method contains the code which is executed before the background processing starts.

• onPostExecute() : This method is called after doInBackground method completes processing. Result from doInBackground is passed to this method.

• onProgressUpdate() : This method receives progress updates from doInBackground() method, which is published via publishProgress() method, and this method can use this progress update to update the UI thread.

• onCancelled(): This method is called when the background task has been canceled. Here we can free up resources or write some cleanup code to avoid memory leaks.

We created a class SensorDataFetch and extended this AsyncTask class and override its methods according to our needs.

private class SensorDataFetch extends AsyncTask<Void, Void, Void> implements SensorEventListener {

   private float data;
   private long timeElapsed;

   @Override
   protected Void doInBackground(Void... params) {
      
       sensorManager.registerListener(this, sensor, updatePeriod);
       return null;
   }

   protected void onPostExecute(Void aVoid) {
       super.onPostExecute(aVoid);
       visualizeData();
   }

   @Override
   protected void onPreExecute() {
 super.onPreExecute();
   //do nothing
   }

   @Override
   protected void onProgressUpdate(Void... values) {
       super.onProgressUpdate(values);
          //do nothing
   }

   @Override
   protected void onCancelled() {
       super.onCancelled();
          //do nothing
   }

In doInBackground() method we implemented the fetching raw data from the sensor by registering the listener and in onPostExecute() method we updated that data on the UI to be viewed by the user.

When this process is being run in the background thread the Main UI thread is free and remains responsive to the user. We can see in Figure 1 below that the UI is responsive to the user swipe action even when the sensor data is updating continuously on the screen.

Resources

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/AsyncTask – Android Developer documentation for Async Task class.