CLAID - Closing the Loop on AI & Data Collection

CLAID is an open-source framework for deploying machine learning an data collection applications across cloud, edge, and mobile devices. The framework enables to build applications from simple configuration files and comes with various ready-to-use Modules. It provides bindings for many different programming languages including C++, Dart, Java, Python and Objective-C and supports Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, WearOS and iOS.

The increasing number of edge devices with enhanced sensing capabilities, such as smartphones, wearables, and IoT devices equipped with sensors, holds the potential for innovative smart-edge applications in healthcare. These devices generate vast amounts of multimodal data, enabling the implementation of digital biomarkers which can be leveraged by machine learning solutions to derive insights, predict health risks, and allow personalized interventions. Training these models requires collecting data from edge devices and aggregating it in the cloud. To validate and verify those models, it is essential to utilize them in real-world scenarios and subject them to testing using data from diverse cohorts. Since some models are too computationally expensive to be run on edge devices directly, a collaborative framework between the edge and cloud becomes necessary. In this paper, we present CLAID, an open-source cross-platform middleware framework based on transparent computing compatible with Android, iOS, WearOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. CLAID enables logical integration of devices running different operating systems into an edge-cloud system, facilitating communication and offloading between them, with bindings available in different programming languages. We provide Modules for data collection from various sensors as well as for the deployment of machine-learning models. Furthermore, we propose a novel methodology, **ML-Model in the Loop** for verifying deployed machine learning models, which helps to analyze problems that may occur during the migration of models from cloud to edge devices. We verify our framework in three different experiments and achieve 100% sampling coverage for data collection across different sensors as well as an equal performance of a cough detection model deployed on both Android and iOS devices. Additionally, we compare the memory and battery consumption of our framework across the two mobile operating systems.