Take control of your phone’s sensors
For several years, the Human Dynamics research group at the MIT Media Lab has been using the standard sensors in smartphones to collect data about people’s social interactions, drawing surprising conclusions about the way political opinions, dietary habits and illnesses — among other things — spread through populations.Now, the group is making its phone-based data-collection system available as a free, open-source download so that other researchers, and people interested in the burgeoning phenomenon of “self-tracking,” can not only use it but also help expand it, incorporating it into other applications or providing it with new features and functions.“There are a lot of other research groups that are reinventing the wheel,” says Nadav Aharony, a PhD student in the group who led the software’s development. “We felt that we were so advanced in this field that we wanted to share this.”Aharony; graduate student Wei Pan; Human Dynamics group leader Sandy Pentland,...