Happy New Year from Audacious Software!

It's been almost a year and a half since my last blog post when we were looking at the passive data disclosures deployed in the Fresh Comics app using Passive Data Kit.

What's been going on since then? In short, the answer is 64.7%.

64.7% represents the company's revenue growth from 2016 to 2017 and is the major reason for my radio silence and lack of official public releases for Audacious Software's open-source projects, mainly Passive Data Kit. I still operate Audacious Software as a single worker business and the growth in revenue isn't the result of higher billing rates, just more projects and hours.

In 2017, Audacious Software:

• Built and deployed a research app called BluBot with Marisa Hall Olsen, a graduate student at Emory University. BluBot is the first external project to use Passive Data Kit and I worked with Olsen to create a proof-of-concept system that trained logistic regression models on the device using a variety of geographic features described by Saeb, et al. in his paper on using location data to estimate device users' mood. (There are some really interesting insights in that paper, so check it out.) In addition to implementing Saeb's mood models on the device, we demonstrated the feasibility of integrating continuous passive data (and predictions) into an electronic medical record (EMR), using OpenEMR as a demonstration system.

• Worked with psychologists Reid Wilson and Michelle Burns to develop and deploy Anxiety Challenger, an Android app that implements an innovative technique for helping patients challenge and move past their anxieties. (A version for iOS will be released early this year, so stay tuned!) Wilson and Burns uses the application engagement data provided by Passive Data Kit (this is the second public deployment) to understand how the app is being used out in the real world.

• Continued working on automated messaging systems in therapeutic contexts with Dr. Adrian Aguilera.

• Created and deployed Sleepsight, an Android application that Dr. Nicholas Meyer (Kings College London) is using to understand the relationship between daily activity, sleep, mood, and psychosis within his study population in London. Sleepsight employs Passive Data Kit to interface with the Nokia Health APIs to retrieve activity and sleep data from Nokia wearables.

• Continued working with clients at Northwestern University and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab to study health topics ranging from detecting oncoming bipolar disorder episodes to assisting new adopters of prosthetic limbs use the devices safely in a variety of contexts.

• Began updating and supporting the Purple Robot data collection system on behalf of Dr. David Mohr (Northwestern University).

• Released a major update to Fresh Comics on the Android platform.

• Modernized and released Santa's Map to Christmas as a free download on iOS, Android, and Amazon devices.

• Continued to assist and guide a stealth Kentucky medical startup through the process needed to develop secure and scalable HIPAA-grade technologies using commodity tools and cloud technologies.

While I am still grossly overdue on a public release of Passive Data Kit, that platform was largely the theme of 2017. (Note that all development is public and visible on the project's GitHub pages: iOS, Android, Django.) It's featured extensively in ongoing projects as well as upcoming work in the pipeline. It's lack of release has been the outcome of the client projects Audacious Software has been very busy shipping. I hope to step back a little bit from client work in the upcoming year and complete the documentation and tutorials needed for a proper public release.

While Passive Data Kit is the major project and theme for 2018, a secondary objective is to develop the tools, familiarity, and competency to begin delivering projects as "companies in a box" when appropriate. A significant number of projects that Audacious Software is primarily responsible for have grown into entities that are ready to become full-grown commercial entities in their own rights. A major project for the year will be moving past ad-hoc methods for project management and design towards more structured systems that provide the support for new team members to successfully pick up where I leave off. To that end, I'm abandoning my home-grown BLAKE system in favor of more standardized tools (such as Atlassian's Jira) as standardized repositories for project histories and institutional knowledge that can be handed off easily to new teams.

Between these two goals (PDK public release and "companies in a box") and the current project pipeline, I'll have my hands full in 2018. It should be a productive year and I look forward to shipping and delivering more products in the months ahead.

Thanks for coming along for the ride,

-Chris Karr
Founder & Chief Developer