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What Your Cell Phone Knows About You

Can your cell phone tell if you're happy or overworked?

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think it can do that and more--separate the rich from the poor, the sick from the healthy, even the outgoing from the introverted. Sandy Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics Research program, has focused his work on that unlikely task: using gadgets as simple as a cell phone to better understand the quirks and patterns of human behavior.

Pentland's experiments began with what he calls a "sociometer," a simple badge-like device that hangs from a subject's neck and records his or her movements, tone of voice, and location. With just those signals collected from large groups of subjects, Pentland says he was able to perform a kind of data analysis he calls "reality mining," finding patterns that reveal a surprising range of information--from how a population breaks down into groups, to which groups are most social and productive, to the personality traits of single individuals, all based on measuring tone of voice and body language.

In his most recent experiments, however, the sociometer hasn't been necessary. Instead, Pentland has tracked his subjects through their cell phones, which are carried by around four out of five Americans. Pentland spoke with Forbes.com about the benefits his tracking experiments could offer to society, the privacy problems they pose and how he hopes to strike a balance between the two.

Forbes.com: What is "reality mining?"

Sandy Pentland: Reality mining is about using sensors to understand human beings. The sensors could be security cameras, they could be devices that you wear on yourself, they could be cell phones. The point is it's about people. Data mining is about finding patterns in digital stuff. I'm more interested specifically in finding patterns in humans. I'm taking data mining out into the real world.

What kind of reality-mining experiments have you actually performed?

We developed this thing called a sociometer, a little badge that you wear around your neck that records your body language, your motion and your tone of voice--the tone, not the words. It gives us a nice little package for reality mining.

We've done all sorts of interesting things with this. Just listening to peoples' tones of voice and how they move, we can measure interest level and attention, factors that account for 40% of the variation in the outcomes of things like salary negotiation, dating scenarios, closing a sale, pitching a business plan.

How can all of that be gleaned from a single device?

Tone of voice and movement reveal a lot more than you might expect. When we did this with the British call center Vertex, we found that just measuring the variability of a salesman's tone of voice and how much he listened versus how much he spoke, we could predict whether the customer was going to buy with 89% accuracy.

Humans have a kind of second language that we're not conscious of, a signaling language. We've evolved to be able to share with each other a lot about our internal state in how active we are, the timing of our interactions, how much we mirror each other. Like when I nod my head, you'll likely start nodding your head, and psychologists have shown that you nodding your head makes you much more likely to believe what I'm saying. Just by looking at where people are, their motion and their tone of voice, you can "x-ray" people in this way.

You've applied this to large groups?

Last year, employees of a German bank used our sociometers while they were working on an ad campaign. We compared their data with survey data to verify it, and we found, for instance, that the sociometers could tell whether people felt overworked, who was happy, who felt their group was well-managed. You could pick out the personality traits in any group, who was an extrovert and an introvert.

We also found that a productive group seems to have to go through a number of configurations. They scatter and reach out for information and then come back together to integrate that information. Groups that go between those two states are the more productive and happier groups.

All of that information came from how subjects carried themselves and who they spent time with. In the end, we could construct the entire org chart--the real org chart, not the one in the front office.

Source : http://www.forbes.com