Reality mining

Reality mining is the collection and analysis of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior, with the goal of identifying predictable patterns of behavior. In 2008, MIT Technology Review called it one of the "10 technologies most likely to change the way we live."

Reality mining studies human interactions based on the usage of wireless devices such as mobile phones and GPS systems providing a more accurate picture of what people do, where they go, and with whom they communicate with rather than from more subjective sources such as a person's own account. Reality mining is one aspect of digital footprint analysis.

Reality Mining is using Big Data to conduct research and analyze how people interact with technology everyday to build systems that allow for positive change from the individual to the global community. Reality Mining also deals with data exhaust .

Individuals use mobile phones, tablets, laptops, cameras, and any device connected to the internet for a variety of purposes, therefore creating a variety of data from GPS locations to frequently asked questions on Google. Mobile phones carry so much data about the individual that now phones can now suggest restaurants based on our searches and visited places, book preference, and even guess the ends of our sentences we type. A simple application of Reality Mining is listening to voices and understanding speech patterns to diagnose medical problems such as the simple flu to even early onset Parkinson's. More powerful phones also allow for calendar customization and event tracking which display behaviors within individuals, what is deemed important enough to track. Social websites also allow researchers to view snapshots of a person's life by following status updates on FaceBook or tweets from Twitter. Even more specific, a recent app called Snapchat allows users to post videos, pictures, or even live streams of exactly what they're doing when they're doing it, strong indicators of behaviors and interactions with the world. In 2004, MIT conducted the Reality Mining Project which gave 100 MIT students a Nokia 6600 which was tracked in a variety of ways by the researchers. TheCell Tower ID #'s (a very cheap and unobtrusive way to measure location), the status of the phone (charging or idle), and any use of the phone's applications (games, web surfing, etc...). They found that by collecting this kind of data, they could predict with high accuracy the behaviors of the students, for example, if one of the students woke up on a Saturday morning at 10 AM, the researches could predict what they were going to do that day using "eigenbehaviors". This new way of understanding data opened up doors for new research and possibly even larger survey research with detailed and accurate statistics. There are hundreds of websites offering software for mobile phones that will track just about everything the phone does, useful for worried parents or people who want to increase their personal productivity. This data is then uploaded to a server and can be accessed at any time.

...
Wikipedia