Mobiles 'ideal' for monitoring movement
Mobile phones could help to track movement
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Thursday, 05, Jun 2008 12:12
Mobile phones could become the latest tool to track patterns of human movement, scientists said today.
A report in the journal Nature claimed the devices could help researchers understand the behaviour of individuals, rather than seeing a general picture of movement.
Scientists at Northeastern University, Boston, studied the movements of 100,000 people by their mobile phone signals over a six-month period.
They mapped people's movements by logging the locations of the transmitter towers that handled each of their calls or text messages.
The study found that most people are creatures of habit, tending to make regular migrations to the same few locations, but with occasional long journeys.
"After correcting for differences in travel distances… the individual travel patterns collapse into a single spatial probability distribution, indicating that, despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns," the researchers write.
"This inherent similarity in travel patterns could impact all phenomena driven by human mobility, from epidemic prevention to emergency response, urban planning and agent-based modelling."
They add that despite the importance of human motion for issues including urban planning and the spread of biological viruses, understanding of the laws governing motion is currently limited.
"Given the known correlations between spatial proximity and social links, our results could help quantify the role of space in network development and evolution and improve our understanding of diffusion processes," the researchers conclude.