Interesting use of context/presence data

MIT has done some interesting research that uses context data from mobile phones — location and usage patterns — to predict broader situations (in this case, illness):

Epidemiologists know that disease outbreaks change mobility patterns, but until now have been unable to track these patterns in any detail. So Madan and colleagues gave cellphones to 70 students in an undergraduate dormitory. The phones came with software that supplied the team with anonymous data on the students’ movements, phone calls and text messages. The students also completed daily surveys on their mental and physical health.

A characteristic signature of illness emerged from the data, which was gathered over a 10-week period in early 2009. Students who came down with a fever or full-blown flu tended to move around less and make fewer calls late at night and early in the morning. When Madan trained software to hunt for this signature in the cellphone data, a daily check correctly identified flu victims 90 per cent of the time.

The technique could be used to monitor the health status of individuals who live alone. Madan is developing a smartphone app that will alert a named contact, perhaps a relative or doctor, when a person’s communication and movement patterns suggest that they are ill.

Public health officials could also use the technique to spot emerging outbreaks of illness ahead of conventional detection systems, which today rely on reports from doctors and virus-testing labs. Similar experiments in larger groups and in different communities will have to be done first though.

This is very much related to work I’d been doing with context data several years ago, and which still interests me a lot. If we can get around the privacy concerns (which is a large part of what I’d been working on), we can synthesize a lot of useful meta-information from the devices that people use. That information can then be used to perform services on the user’s behalf, or do other helpful things.

Alas, the paper is behind a paywall, and I can’t find a loose copy around.

You got a coupon?

The New York Times “Bits” blog carried an item a few weeks ago about electronic coupons, sent to your mobile device at appropriate times:

How many times have you heard the prediction that one day, businesses like coffee shops will send us coupons on our mobile phones when we walk by?

That has long been the dream of mobile marketers. Still, only 9 percent of people have received a coupon or discount code on their phones based on where they were standing, according to new data from Compete, a Web analytics firm.

This could be the year that changes. People are increasingly interested in receiving coupons on their phones, especially at the grocery store, Compete found. On Wednesday, Target announced that it would start sending mobile coupons.

When I worked at IBM Research, several of my co-workers did a project involving a retail establishment and customers’ mobile devices. They dealt with electronic coupons, as well as other uses of the mobile technology, and they wrote a paper about the project. The abstract:

Toward a Mobile Digital Wallet

Mobile phones have now made their way into a large fraction of pockets and handbags worldwide. An intriguing question is whether such phones will eventually replace the physical wallets we carry. We believe the answer is in the affirmative, though plenty of challenges abound in overcoming entrenched personal and business practices and processes. In this paper, we explore the changes that need to ripple through the ecosystem to build a vibrant set of digital wallet services that potentially interact with each other to provide users both with increased convenience and a level of functionality hitherto unrealized. We describe our initial mobile wallet prototypes on web-enabled smart phones, designed to explore some of the challenges in creating the architecture and infrastructure necessary to make this vision a reality. Feedback from users and experts across a range of industries such as retail, banking, telecommunications, and healthcare indicate that we have just scratched the surface and a substantial wave of innovation is necessary to make the digital wallet a full-fledged reality.

Would consumers want to receive coupons and other offers on their phones, or would the interruptions just annoy them, seeming to be spam? My colleagues found that customers in the pilot program liked getting the coupons, and used them. In their paper, they note these results:

1. The frequency of in-store visits was greater than the visit rate of the baseline loyalty program.
2. The electronic coupon redemption rate was several times higher than traditional paper coupon redemption rates.

Indeed, going back to the Bits blog in the Times:

Thirty-six percent of consumers said they would like to receive mobile grocery coupons, 29 percent said they want cellphone apps that scan product barcodes for an offer or discount, and 26 percent want coupons from movie theaters.

Are electronic coupons the wave of the future? What about the general concept of an electronic wallet? If we could solve the privacy and security problems, would people like using their mobile devices at points of sale, in lieu of money or credit/debit cards?

I think I would.

Tracking in the 21st century

This New Scientist article reminds me of a project I worked on about ten years ago. The article talks about analyzing mobile-phone location data to establish patterns of how the users move around. We didn’t analyze predictability rates, but we did look for patterns that foretold other patterns, like this bit from the article:

“Say your routine movement is from home to the coffee shop to work: if you are at home and then go to the coffee shop it’s easy for me to predict that you are going to work,” says co-author Nicholas Blumm.

We similarly looked for patterns that predicted that you were on your way home, to work, or some other such. We used that to set up some experimental stuff, like adjusting my house thermostat (which I can control over the Internet) when I was on my way home. It was fun stuff to play with.

At the time, I wrote a program for the BlackBerry that would, if you installed it and enabled it, send telemetry to a “context server” that we created. The telemetry included information about the cell to which the BlackBerry was connected, and it was sent at intervals, and also whenever the cell changed. And we had a mapping of the cell IDs to the actual locations of the cells. We would never get that today, unfortunately, but we could learn the mapping for the user’s local area. And by aggregating the information from many users, we could probably made a pretty good mapping ourselves.

One of my colleagues visited family in northern Virginia, and had his BlackBerry sending telemetry on the way home, on a Monday. I remember mapping that in real time, and watching his progress up US 15, I-78, and I-287. I could even tell where he’d made significant stops, and we had a good time going over the trip when he was in the office on Tuesday.

That was a fun project, and we got some interesting results, though we ultimately didn’t go very far with them. It’ll be nice to see where this new group of researchers goes.

Maybe we’ll track them on their mobile phones.