On the Design and Performance Evaluation of Android Based Alarming Applications

The aim of this paper is to investigate and discuss issues on the design and performance evaluation of Android applications concerning alarming systems that would serve users in emergency or dangerous situations to be able to send text messages in real time giving information about their location and about their needs in searching for help. The user, for instance, could send a message to their chosen contacts just by shaking the phone a predefined number of times or following any other pattern of action involving the smartphone. The application designed has, also, some other features like sounding an alarm for 10 s, automatically opening the hospital map searching for hospitals in the area and automatically opening the police map searching for police stations nearby. While opening each of the maps mentioned, the user could check their location as well. Many other similar features could be added in the designed application. But the main goal of the paper is to investigate design issues in Android applications regarding real time performance as well as to evaluate performance in such time critical applications. Therefore, the contribution of this paper lies on comparing real time performance of different implementations of such an alarming application as well as on presenting step by step design, architectural and implementation issues of it.