Science and technology

Your mobile phone as an intelligent sensing machine

Reality mining is becoming a big trend! Companies must be aware of that! Some great examples of reality mining are SoundSense and CenceMe! Your mobile phone as an intelligent piece of technology!

Some clever people from the Dartmouth College (Hanover) created software that uses the microphone of a cell phone to track and interpret a user's activity. Sounds great? Well it is. The software is called SoundSense and the software is also able to select the sounds and put them in different categories. If a sound is to difficult to analyze SoundSense asks the user to confirm a sound in a specific category and offers the option to label the sound by hand.

A system that can recognize sounds in a person's life can be used to search for others who have the same preferences. Using sounds to classify events can give users feedback on their daily activities for health or time-management applications

Monitoring sound gives a lot more richer information than an accelerometer can provide. The program works on the mobile phone and doesn't use much extra power. The developers of the application say that SoundSense is able to recognize even the most strangest sounds. In a test SoundSense was able to 'hear' when the user was cycling, standing in a pub, brushing her teeth etc.

The SoundSense system is our first step in building a system that can learn [user behavior] on the go (Tanzeem Choudhury)

I believe that the mobile phone will become a very intelligent machine which will monitor our heath, the way we life and is able to really help us out in our everyday lives. It becomes our sixth sense. Our mobile phone will even share our emotions and where we are with our friends on the several social networks. An example of this is already CenceMe.

CenceMe software infers human presence information based on iPhone™ sensors, for example, activity, location. Soon, CenceMe will even be able to determine if a person is busy in a conversation, or dancing at a party, and will automatically learn your buddies' favorite hang outs

Both examples show that reality mining is becoming a big trend. Technology becomes every day more intelligent and will finally adjust itself to our way of lives. Like technology should be!