Reality Mining
Reality Mining is using Big Data to conduct research and analyze how people interact with technology everyday to build systems that allow for positive change from the individual to the global community. Reality Mining also deals with data exhaust .
Individual Scale (1 person)
Individuals use mobile phones, tablets, laptops, cameras, and any device connected to the internet for a variety of purposes, therefore creating a variety of data from GPS locations to frequently asked questions on Google. Mobile phones carry so much data about the individual that now phones can now suggest restaurants based on our searches and visited places, book preference, and even guess the ends of our sentences we type. A simple application of Reality Mining is listening to voices and understanding speech patterns to diagnose medical problems such as the simple flu to even early onset Parkinson's. More powerful phones also allow for calendar customization and event tracking which display behaviors within individuals, what is deemed important enough to track. Social websites also allow researchers to view snapshots of a person's life by following status updates on FaceBook or tweets from Twitter. Even more specific, a recent app called Snapchat allows users to post videos, pictures, or even live streams of exactly what they're doing when they're doing it, strong indicators of behaviors and interactions with the world. In 2004, MIT conducted the Reality Mining Project which gave 100 MIT students a Nokia 6600 which was tracked in a variety of ways by the researchers. TheCell Tower ID #'s (a very cheap and unobtrusive way to measure location), the status of the phone (charging or idle), and any use of the phone's applications (games, web surfing, etc...). They found that by collecting this kind of data, they could predict with high accuracy the behaviors of the students, for example, if one of the students woke up on a Saturday morning at 10 AM, the researches could predict what they were going to do that day using "eigenbahaviors". This new way of understanding data opened up doors for new research and possibly even larger survey research with detailed and accurate statistics. There are hundreds of websites offering software for mobile phones that will track just about everything the phone does, useful for worried parents or people who want to increase their personal productivity. This data is then uploaded to a server and can be accessed at any time.
Although already a lot of data can be collected from personal devices, they only make up a part of a person's life. Reality Miners can also use biometric devices to measure physical health and activity. There are many devices like this as the Fitbit, Nike+, and Polar and Garmin GPS watches. There is even an app called Sleep Cycle for iPhone and Android users that measures sleep quality, which includes the amount of sleep and even optimal alarms settings. Using this data, Reality Miners may be able to measure one's actual health and processes that allow to function (or dysfunction). Heart attacks generally don't have any longitudinal indicators, but using all this data or even when a person engages in Lifelogging can create useful data to the medical field and track the lifestyles of those who undergo heart attacks to then create preventative guidelines. There are several ways to start Lifelogging, Google has it's own device called Google Glass that has a Heads-Up-Display (HUD), a microphone, a processor, and a camera. These are all ways to log information in specific directories.
Community Scale (10 to 1,000 people)
City Scale (1,000 to 1,000,000 people)
National Scale (1 million to 10 million people)
Global Scale (10 million to 7 billion people)