Communications

Smart Badges Track Human Behavior

(Page 2 of 2)

  • Wednesday, January 30, 2008
  • By Kate Greene


Waber says that the smart badges used in his experiment, which are about the size of a deck of cards but weigh less, can do more than just show face-to-face interactions and display a real-time social graph, and he has plans to look at the rest of the data to see what patterns emerge. For example, since the wireless radio can sense proximity and voice data, it's possible to infer when a person is engaged in a group discussion and who the expert is.

Also, accelerometer data could indicate activity at the conference. Waber says that if a conference organizer is running around, it could indicate that he needs help getting things done. This could indicate that the organizer should plan for more help at certain times during an event.

Some experts suspect that, within the next few years, smart badges won't be confined to conferences and events. "We think that eventually everyone will have a smart badge with them all the time: their cell phone," says Alex Kass, a researcher who leads reality-mining projects at Accenture, a technology firm. "Cell phones will transmit some kind of identity or interesting information to the people around you; you'll decide certain aspects of your identity that you want to broadcast in public," he says.

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deejay

23 Comments

  • 1477 Days Ago
  • 01/30/2008

Privacy issues with smart badges

Since this means that a person's movements and interactions can be tracked, I would assume that the participants were fully aware that they were under observation. This would address any privacy issues that could arise.

Conversely, if they knew that they were under observation, could it have affected their inherent behaviour, and thus negate/influence the findings of the study?

I would be very disturbed if this were done  without my prior knowledge. This includes the tracking of movement thru cell phones.

Anybody thinking differently?

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pmagrass

4 Comments

  • 1477 Days Ago
  • 01/30/2008

Re: Privacy issues with smart badges

You raise excellent points. I would add that technology-related privacy concerns present two facets: unconscious (and mostly innocuous) individuals can be tracked, while malicious people and criminals can fake the system by showing artificial patterns and consequently masking their identity or assuming someone else's. (This, of course, happened long before the advent of digital technologies... as any fake passport will attest) :-) Paolo Magrassi

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