Publications

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Blog, May 7, 2009.
Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland is the co-director of the Digital Life Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ... Pentland has a grant from Pioneer to explore the potential role of reality mining technology - a concept that he helped develop - in medicine and in public health. We asked him to tell us about this work, and he responded:

We live our lives in digital networks. We wake up in the morning, check our e-mail, make a quick phone call, commute to work, buy lunch. Many of these transactions leave digital breadcrumbs - tiny records of our daily experiences. Reality mining, which pulls together these crumbs using statistical analysis and machine learning methods, offers an increasingly comprehensive picture of our lives, both individually and collectively, with the potential of transforming our understanding of ourselves, our organizations, and our society in a fashion that was barely conceivable just a few years ago. It is for this reason that reality mining was recently identified by Technology Review as one of - 10 emerging technologies that could change the world.

To illustrate, consider two examples of how reality mining may benefit individual health care. By taking advantage of special sensors in mobile phones, such as the microphone or the accelerometers built into newer devices like Apple's iPhone, important diagnostic data can be captured. Commercial trials by start-up Cogito Health are demonstrating that we can accurately screen for depression from the way a person talks -- depressed people tend to speak more slowly, a change that speech analysis software on a phone might recognize more readily than friends or family do. Similarly, experiments in my laboratory have shown that monitoring a phone’s motion sensors can also reveal small changes in gait, which could be an early indicator of ailments such as Parkinson’s disease.

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