Cellphone Study Reveals Surprising Patterns in People’s Movement

A new study conducted by researchers at Northeastern University has revealed some interesting properties of human movement through tracking their mobile phone use. The study used data collected from 100,000 randomly selected individuals in an undisclosed European country; every time an anonymously tracked user received or made a call or SMS, the mobile base station used was recorded to determine his/her approximate (within 3 km sq.) location. The results, gathered after six months of data collection, indicated that the majority of people travel a relatively short distance, somewhere between 5km-10km a day on a regular basis, and tend to re-visit the same spots over and over again. The research team also made the somewhat surprising discovery that people’s movement followed a power law distribution, a mathematical relationship that is seen in other natural and social phenomena, like earthquake sizes and income distribution.BBC points out the potential applications of the report’s findings, and that several companies and researchers have begun using mobile tracking as a way to gather information on other types of movement, like traffic flow.

“It would be wonderful if every [mobile] carrier could give universities access to their data because it’s so rich,” said Dr Marta Gonzalez of Northeastern University, Boston, US, and one of the authors of the paper.

…Professor John Cleland of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Disease (LSHTM) said the study could be of use to people monitoring the spread of contagious diseases. “Avian flu is the obvious one,” he told BBC News. “When an outbreak of mammalian infectious airborne disease hits us, the movement of people is of critical concern.”

Although the scale of the latest study is unprecedented, it is not the first time that mobile phone technology has been used to track people’s movements. Scientists at MIT have used mobile phones to help construct a real-time model of traffic in Rome, whilst Microsoft researchers working on Project Lachesis are examining the possibility of mining mobile data to help commuters pick the optimum route to work, for example.

BBC News: Mobile Phone Expose Human Habits