I am a member of the ACM Member Technical Interest Service and I receive a monthly email from this service. In the June edition, they were suggesting a paper which was among the top three downloaded articles - "Monitoring smartphones for anomaly detection". It is an interesting paper that shows how to monitor a smartphone running Symbian OS in order to extract features that describe the state of the device and can be used for anomaly detection. I think this paper is a left-field paper for most of the SIGACCESS members but I wonder if such applications can be reused/repurposed for better customisation for supporting better accessibility.

In this paper we demonstrate how to monitor a smartphone running Symbian OS in order to extract features that describe the state of the device and can be used for anomaly detection. These features are sent to a remote server, because running a complex intrusion detection system (IDS) on this kind of mobile device still is not feasible, due to capability and hardware limitations. We give examples on how to compute some of the features and introduce the top ten applications used by mobile phone users basing on a study in 2005. The usage of these applications is recorded and visualized and for a first comparison, data results of the monitoring of a simple malware are given.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1165387.30864
Full Proceedings: MOBILWARE '08: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on MOBILe Wireless MiddleWARE, Operating Systems, and Applications, Austria, 2008.