Pervasive longitudinal studies in people's intimate surroundings involve gathering data about how people behave in their various places of presence. It is hard to be fully pervasive as it has traditionally required sophisticated instrumentation that may be difficult to acquire and prohibitively expensive. Moreover, setting up such an experiment is laborious.
We present a system, in the form of its requirements, design and implementation, that is primarily aimed at collecting data from people's homes. It aims to be as pervasive as possible, and can collect data about a family in the form of audio and video feed from microphones and cameras, network logs and home appliance (eg., TV) usage patterns. The data is then transported over the Internet to a server placed in the close proximity of the researcher, while protecting it from unauthorised access. Instead of instrumenting the test subjects' existing devices, we build our own integrated appliance which is to be placed inside their houses, and has all the necessary features for data collection and transportation. We build the system using cheap off-the-shelf commodity hardware and free and open source software, and evaluate different hardware and software configurations to see how well they can be integrated and how performant or reliable they are in real life scenarios.
Finally, we demonstrate a few simple techniques that can be used to analyze the data to gain some insights into the behaviour of the participants.
