Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Sensing Populations: Mobile Public Health
Famous mathematician and network theorist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and colleauges have used large sets of mobile phone location observations to better understand the mobility patterns of large human populations. [http://tinyurl.com/5s7c5y]
The reasearch is sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and either CDC or NIH. Alex and I saw him speak in Budapest last year and he talked about how this new data will help us understand and model disease propagation in epidemics. You can use it to model and measure in real-time the flux of people into and out of various sized areas in a city or other geographic unit.
What this signal indicates is that mobile health can transform both public health research and management, by leveraging citizens as probes and sensing platforms, not just for environmental data as we have seen in many other projects but also epidemiological.
You can also imagine using this kind of data to find out if child populations are getting enough exercise, etc.
The privacy implications are enormous. See some of the debate here www.nancyscola.com/2008/06/barabasi_study_and_the_privacy.html