Like this guy, soon you will be indistinguishable from your mobile according to Roy Want of Intel Research. The key idea in this area is that the mobile phone can be taken as a proxy for the person. We have already seen the rapid integration of phone, photograph, music, and internet services in the iphone. Windows mobile devices do all this with addition of microsoft office and other pc products. There area many life domains that can be quickly synthesised into the mobile including credit card payments, things like eazy pass, and also security access to buildings etc.
The next notch up is mobile sensing. On the one hand the capacity is there with bluetooth functionality on most mobiles and blackberry mainstreaming gps in their devices. However, the future of these devices will be to produce feedback to the user about their physical and social evironment and their internal psychophysiology. This can be in real-time and in the form of summary feedback with a key aspect being real-time data streaming to online analysis systems with instant individualised reporting, advice, and collaborative planning.
A practical example is building the capacity into phones to sense if someone you know is in the area at the moment. How many times do we have missed connections, pass familiar faces without noticing, or bump into those we don't want to see!
But more exciting from a research perspective is the possibility of collecting data which users generate proactively and feeding back advice in order to aid in behaviour change. The author of the article here talks mostly about Bodymedia Sensewear which is a wearable computer which assesses accelerometry, heat flux, and galvanic skin response continuously throughout the day. This then analyses the output of these sensors to produce results which are more than the sum of their parts in that they produce novel data from multiple sensor sources. Their algorithms are refined continuously through constant consumer data streaming across the globe.
Sony ericsson have integrated an accelerometer into a recent mass marketed phone. It is not unfeasible that future technologies will combine wearable sensing technologies and bluetooth or body surface wireless transmission to build a picture of the persons life where they can receive feedback on their activity levels, their heart, their locations across the day, the kind of pollutants they were exposed to, the noise levels in their surrounds and so on. This will produce a platform for those interested in health behaviour to collect data on a wide-scale and test and tailor interventions to those interested. So next time someone asks you how are you, the answer might be 'hold on a second, let me check my phone!'.
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