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AIRS allows for configuring several options in the following preference screen. You can also display a brief description of each option when selecting the About menu item (press your Android Menu key):

For the remote sensing sessions, you can configure the following settings:

• Server Name: this is the DNS name or IP address of your AIRS application server that is being used. Note that the server needs to be publicly accessible in order to be reachable by the AIRS mobile client
• Server port: this is the port number being used by the AIRS application server (such as 9000)

For the local sensing sessions, you can configure the following settings:

• Local Display: a local session always starts a background service that performs the sensing itself. Here you can configure whether or not the background service keeps track of the last value for each sensor being sensed. Otherwise, only the number of sensed values is kept. Battery-wise, there is hardly any impact when enabling this function – this is of course under the assumption that you are not displaying the values themselves, which DOES require additional battery.
• Local Storage: AIRS can store the sensor values in a text file. This file, if selected here, is stored in the main directory of the SD card user space (usually at /mnt/sdcard) within the directory /AIRS_values. The filename for each session is created based on the timestamp in milliseconds at the time of starting the session. This ensures (a) unique filenames for each sessions and (b) increasing order of filenames.
• Sensor History: AIRS supports displaying historical values of certain sensors, such as environmental noise, GPS coordinates or others. In this setting, you can set the number of values stored per sensor that supports such history. The default setting is 20, setting the value to 0 disables the history feature.
• Safe Writing: Usually file operations are performed in so-called buffered mode, i.e., data is first buffered in memory and then saved to the SD card in batches. This minimizes memory card operations and therefore saves battery. However, if the background service for the sensing crashes, the last batch of values will be lost. This option allows for enabling a safe writing mode, which flushes the buffer after every sensing operation. This does impact the battery although not greatly!
• Wakeup: Android devices usually sleep when the screen switches off. This is to preserve battery. With this, however, AIRS will stop sensing most sensor values, too. This can be desired, i.e., in scenarios in which user activity is of interest, not the activity when the device is not used. IF you want to continuously sense values, you will need to keep the device awake (through a so-called wake-lock), which you can enable by this setting.
• Battery Kill Condition: Allows for setting a battery level for killing AIRS recording (remote or local) in case that the battery falls below that value. This allows for saving spare capacity when you are out and about.

There are also general settings which apply for both remote and local sensing:

• Reminder interval: AIRS can inform you about an ongoing sensing session through a brief vibration and/or LED notification (on supported devices only). Here, you select the interval for this vibration. If you select ‘0′ as a value, the vibration is switched off. Note that you will always have a notification bar indication that AIRS is running!
• Vibrate: check if you want a vibration reminder
• Lights: check if you want a LED/light reminder
• Color Code: color code in HEX notation (e.g., ff0000 for RED) for LED notification
• Debug: AIRS debugs several parts of the program. Here you switch the debugging on and off. Debug messages will be stored in the main directory of the SD card under the file name AIRS_log.txt. Debugging will consume more battery and slightly slow down AIRS!