Phone data as Treasure Trove to Urban Scientist

A team of data scientists revealed a strong correlation between mobile phone data activity and electricity consumption within Senegal, West Africa. They gathered anonymised phone calls and texts from entire country and estimated electricity consumption by measuring amount of light produced by cities using satellite images. The phone activity data turned out to be a better indicator of energy consumption than census data such as population density.

Socioeconomics data are very hard to get because they usually require expensive census. Developing countries often do not have enough resource to gather such data in time and thus cannot spot its social problems and address these problems effectively. Mobile phone data shows the potential to replace some of the census data. Researchers have also used it to estimate the literacy level in developing countries and revealed human reproductive strategies . This new way of analysis is scalable due to the rapid growth of cell phone ownership. From this global survey we see that even in developing countries the median rate of owning a mobile phone is now 78 per cent.

For urban scientist, analysing the ubiquitous phone data certainly offers new ways to think about infrastructure planning and to do many other interesting inferences. So think about how phone data can play a role in your next project.