Bringing Serverless Functions Closer To Citizen Science Mobile Applications

Soundless.app is a citizen science mobile application designed to collect acoustic and health-related data from residents of Tarragona, Spain. The app follows a traditional centralized architecture, where serverless functions in the cloud receive data from users' devices, perform aggregation and analysis, and return the processed results back to the clients. Although this model simplifies data processing and scales well, it presents a significant drawback: citizens have limited ownership and control over their data. All analytical insights are generated in the cloud and users depend on a remote infrastructure to access the results. Moreover, this architecture does not provide participants with a straightforward way to independently reproduce or verify scientific findings using the aggregated data on their own devices.

To address these challenges, we present several approaches for integrating serverless functions into mobile applications. Our soundless-based prototype evaluation demonstrates that existing cloud-based serverless functions can be executed directly on smartphones, without requiring any modifications to their source code, and with performance levels suitable for small- to large-scale citizen science projects. The findings suggest that bringing serverless functions to user-controlled devices enhances transparency and reproducibility in citizen science. By allowing both data and code to be reviewed, executed, modified, and shared directly from smartphones, citizens gain greater autonomy and trust in the scientific process.