Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Mining reality for persuasive feedback
Nadav Aharony, an MIT Media Lab graduate student, studies how that data that's passively collected by mobile devices can be used to predict the user's behavior. According to Aharony, the "reality mining" research in the Human Dynamics Lab where he works is leading to a "a new kind of microscope - a means of making the social sciences more precise." "People are a lot more programmed than you think," he says. As IFTF explored in last year's "Everything is Programmable" research thread, these new rivers of data can reveal dials in the "control systems" that we can tweak for desired outcomes or, in the case of people, behaviors. Of course, the big question is who gets to twist those knobs? From an article in Haaretz:
It is sometimes difficult not to recoil when Aharony relates how the researchers distributed sensors or mobile phones to scores of people and collected data on them in what he calls a living laboratory, and he indeed understands the feeling.
"Who is using this today?" he asks. "Advertising companies have thorough knowledge of persuasion technologies and use them to 'hack' into our desires, to persuade us to buy more and more. However, what if we use these same tools to cause people to stop smoking or to decide what we eat?"
For example, explains Aharony, "There is a correlation between measures of depression and social activity. Therefore, if mobile phones can detect changes in social behavior, it will be possible to identify depression, or even the development of Alzheimer's disease among elderly people, and to inform friends and family members. After a number of warning lights, it will be possible to recommend to the user that he seek help."