A Data Sharing Platform for Earables Research

Ear-worn wearable devices, or earables, are a rapidly emerging sensor platform, with unique opportunities to collect a wide variety of sensor data, and build systems with novel human-computer interaction components. At this point in the development of the field, with projects such as eSense putting hardware in researchers' hands but being limited in reach, the sharing of datasets collected by researchers with the wider community would bring a number of benefits. A central data sharing platform would enable wider participation in earables research and improve the quality of projects, as well as being a vehicle for better data quality and data protection practices. We discuss the considerations behind building such a platform, and propose an architecture that would achieve better privacy-utility trade-offs than many existing data sharing efforts.