Interesting BBC article about the use of mobile phones to track people's movements for research purposes. I feel kind of ambivalent about this - on the one hand it's terrific that they can build up data sets on human movement for research purposes that can be used in planning for disease outbreaks, traffic flow analysis, and optimizing pathfinding. On the other, it's kind of frightening how your every move can be so easily tracked; while this study is anonymous, it isn't voluntary either and can so easily be abused by, for instance, unscrupulous governments.
Still, there's already lots of great stuff that can be done with mobiles, and this is yet another. The idea of attaching more sensors that can be used for various purposes - such as studying air quality, as the article mentions - is pretty exciting. We're well on the way to having our own tricorders!
On another note, the findings of the study with regard to human movement patterns is quite interesting (though to my untrained mind, not altogether surprising)!
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