Android Wear: Measuring Sensors And Preventing Ambient Mode / Sleep

I have built an app for Android Wear that needs to measure the motion (accelerometer) sensors continuously for an hour or so for data collection purposes. During operation, I have

Solution 1:

1) Use a wake lock. To keep the CPU awake but let the screen go dim, you can use code like the following:

PowerManagerpowerMgr= (PowerManager) getSystemService(Context.POWER_SERVICE);
wakeLock = powerMgr.newWakeLock(PowerManager.PARTIAL_WAKE_LOCK, TAG);
wakeLock.acquire(duration);

where TAG is a string to indicate the component holding the wake lock, and duration is measured in milliseconds.

I assume I don't need to warn you about the adverse battery effects of keeping the device from going into ambient. An average Wear device may or may not last for the solid hour you're proposing.

2) Yes. This is kind of the definition of a Service, "an application component representing either an application's desire to perform a longer-running operation while not interacting with the user" (from https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Service.html).

3) Yes. I do this in a number of apps; there's no requirement that Data API calls need to be on the UI thread.