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Sep 23, 2009 04:11 PM | 10
A team of Duke University researchers in Durham, N.C., is studying new ways to use the abundance of sensors contained in most smart phones (including the camera, accelerometer, microphone, GPS and Wi-Fi radio) to determine mobile users' precise locations and thereby deliver hyper-localized services. This could enable a business such as Starbuck's to text-message a coupon to a person's phone as he or she enters the coffee shop, or it could allow Wal-Mart to send shoppers a listing of sales items as soon as the store's doors slide open. Another option could be to provide blind mobile subscribers with information about where they are as they move from store to store within a mall.
The researchers argue in a paper presented today at the ACM MobiCom 2009 conference in Beijing that the increasing number of sensors on mobile phones presents new opportunities for logical localization, which is more useful to people than simply representing their location as a set of latitude and longitude coordinates.
To test their argument, the researchers wrote a software application called SurroundSense, which uses optical, acoustic, motion and other data captured by mobile phones to create a "fingerprint" of a given location, says lead researcher Romit Roy Choudhury, a Duke assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. For the purposes of their study, the researchers visited 51 different stores and restaurants and used their mobile phones to gather data about the sights, sounds and layout (measured via accelerometer) at various times of the day. The phones send this data back to the SurroundSense server, which created a database of location fingerprints.
Once a fingerprint was made for each place, the researchers sent students into the stores and restaurants visited to see if their mobile phones (communicating with SurroundSense) could correctly deduce their location. "We achieved an average accuracy of over 85 percent when all sensors were employed for localization," Choudhury says.
SurroundSense alone might not work as a service that could be sold to mobile users, Choudhury acknowledges, but it could be combined with a global-satellite positioning service such as Microsoft's prototype GeoLife to enable location-specific advertising on cell phones or locator services that can communicate to a blind person info about his or her surroundings in real time. Scaling SurroundSense could also prove to be a big challenge, given the volume of information coming into the system from mobile users (whether from the same Wal-Mart location or an entire city).
Choudhury is working on several other mobile-phone projects as well, including the PhonePoint Pen application, which can capture a mobile phone user's hand movements, whether drawing a picture, jotting down numbers or writing a sentence. The software is able to translate numbers and capital letters written in English (adding other languages is on their to-do list) into a message that can be e-mailed and accessed either from a computer or mobile phone. Pictures are saved as .jpg attachments that can be sent along with e-mails.
Image ©iStockphoto.com/ Josh Hodge
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10 Comments
Add CommentAny technology that would allow a business to track my movements and advertise directly to me, on my cell phone no less, is, what's the word for a million times beyond unacceptable?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTalking about identity thief! Best way to stop that kind of intrusion...download Zone Alarm Pro to your smart phone and block unwanted internet spyware and maleware entries.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese applications better be optional. The last thing I want is to be tracked and targeted for advertising.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe behaviors described are definitely intrusive and unacceptable. Once the technological means become available, we will almost certainly have businesses making power plays, trying these techniques, and testing the waters. We will have to stand up and make noise to get laws passed to prevent this sort of thing. Unfortunately, as motivation is often lacking where a threat is theoretical, we will probably have to endure an initial period of intrusion in this manner before (and if) protections are enacted. Unfortunately, the implications for law-enforcement are even scarier - and much likelier to win legal sanction in the end, under the guise of War on Something.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUltimately, we seem to be headed toward a truer panopticon than Orwell or Bentham foresaw - in this version, it will not be that we are observed frequently, with the possibility of being observed at any time without expressly knowing when - rather, we will be actually monitored constantly, with massive computers to sort the data and provide the hyper-vigilance humans could only pretend to.
That is, if we aren't there already.
I wonder when you will be arested for not carrying your cell phone? this technology could be acceptable if it was passive and only worked when the cell phone intensionally anouced itself.
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"I wonder when you will be arrested for not carrying your cell phone?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFunny you mention that. You can be certain that these same concepts are being designed into the national ID card that will become mandatory in the very near future. Just today there was a article on the Drudge Report which claimed that the Obama administration is trying to make it easier for the government to obtain cell phone records on individuals without warrants. The fact is that if this is actually done it will be by a republican majority in the house and backed up by a conservative majority in the Supreme Court. The perpetrators will insist it was the fault of their opposition. It's all smoke and mirrors folks and we the people will eat it up like the sheeple we have become.