Your Smartphone Could Stop an Epidemic
The devices in our pockets already track our locations. By leveraging all that data to predict and track public health crises, we might finally get something back for it.
By Mark Wilson
Even if you don’t have your phone’s GPS enabled, you’re still sharing your approximate position every moment your phone is on. It’s easy to forget that our phones actually connect to the cellphone towers, which are physical antennas dotted around cities. That’s one reason why, for years, our wireless carriers were able to secretly sell so much information about us.
But what if some of this big data could be used for a less nefarious purpose than marketing? That’s the idea behind new research from MIT and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology published in Nature: by leveraging the cellphone positioning data of millions of users, we might be able to predict, and prevent, the spread of epidemics across cities.
As the researchers explain in the paper, the ways epidemics spread across an entire country are relatively well understood at this point. In other words, that map you see in virus movies where one red dot becomes two red dots and then ensconces the globe may look sensational, but the idea behind it is…
