I recently came across a paper called "Social Sensing for Epidemiological Behavior Change". It describes a study in which smartphone use of college students was used to identify behavior changes associated with the presence of illness (colds, flu, fever, stress, depression).
The researchers gave smartphones to college students in a dormitory and tracked phone usage with call data records, sms logs, proximity sensing, and location-based sensing. Students also completed a brief questionnaire regarding the presence of symptoms. Proximity sensing enabled detecting when these student participants were physically close to other participants. The researchers found that student who developed a fever or cold tended to move around less and made fewer calls in the morning and late at night.
I think this is absolutely fascinating. It makes me think that there may be a whole world of meaning that can be extracted from data that are readily available but that we're missing. I rarely hear anyone in my field, Psychology/Neuroscience, talk about pattern recognition technologies -- we're trained to formulate hypotheses (expectations based upon what we know). But this is limiting. There's a world of surprises awaiting us if we just know how to look.
No comments:
Post a Comment