Low quality Audio during playback

[nleo575]

While using plugins that record/process audio (ambient noise and conversations), audio quality is severely degraded while playing over bluetooth (call or radio quality). As soon as the sensor would start to record, the audio quality would drop. This could only be remedied by force closing the AWARE app, turning off the audio sensors, or deleting AWARE altogether. The problem was a constant frustration for users who played audio over bluetooth.

This issue was repeatable and present on 87.5% (7 of 8) iPhones during our test. It would have been 100% but one user reported they don't own bluetooth headphones or speakers.

Overall severity: Major UX problem - 5 out of 5 where 5 is worse. Given how poor this made the UX while using AWARE, all users polled said they would DEFINITELY not continue to use the app if this problem persisted.

Based on a discussion with all testers (which included data scientists and a PI), we feel that unless the issue can be fixed completely - i.e. having the ability to sample audio from the device's microphone while audio is simultaneously playing without experiencing playback issues, then the best solution is to not record any audio if the device is already playing audio.

To avoid having missing data all together, the device could record null values with a label of some sort in the database. Or instead of a label, maybe negative values.

For the ambient noise plugin, the double_frequency, double_decibels, and double_rms could be -1, and is_silent could be set to 0.

For conversations (studentlife_audio), datatype could be 0, double energy could be -1, and inference could be 1.

[tetujin]

I transferred this issue to AWARE-library repository from AWARE-UI repository, because this is a bug in the AWARE-library.