Editor’s note: This article is
by Dipanjan Chakraborty, a computer scientist at IBM Research – India’s Telecom and Mobile Research
Center.
With the rapid adoption
of smartphones and improved sensing capabilities on these devices, businesses want
to take advantage of this “swarm of smartphone sensors” and answer the
question:
how can our smartphones effectively utilize
its sensors for our personal benefit, as well as benefit the businesses we seek
services from?
I’m part of the team at IBM Research – India
that built a mobile solution to do just that. The technology integrates with
existing apps on smartphones to cut across everything from function (such as
GPS or coupons) to business (such as retail or healthcare), to help individuals
and organizations work together, and learn from one another.
In a nutshell, it allows businesses to perform surgically
precise mobile data collection from devices, offering the ability to control
the sensors on the smartphone in a “smart” way. It performs real-time analytics
to convert mobile data into meaningful events for the owner of the smartphone, and
for the businesses he or she wants to interact with.
On the backend, the collected data takes into account
users’ contextual preferences: which services do they want to share their data
with, at what times of the day, and where, for example. Now, businesses have
the data you want them to have, and they know how you want to interact with
them.
Helping navigate the world around you
The solution utilizes smartphone sensing to improve
insights about individuals, while also improving the processes of the
businesses they interact with. It has been built so that users can provide
fine-grained access rights of when their smartphone can “sense” and when it
can’t. This is different, more powerful and flexible from the model used by
most of today’s apps, which ask for blanket approval to use the device’s
resources. For example, we’re piloting it with DLF, a large retailer in India that will
allow their shops to push sales deals to shoppers (via their store’s app),
based on footfall heat maps – all on an opt-in basis for the shopper.
Sensors are everywhere, and can do so much more than
provide shopping deals. In the near future, our team hopes to connect businesses
in a variety of industries to these sensors, via this mobile technology. Doctors
could remotely monitor their recently discharged heart surgery patients. A city
government could monitor noise pollution, traffic, or hotspots of citizens’
activities using mobile data from their smartphones.
In the case of a city working with its citizens to develop
this interaction between the enterprise and the community, the technology also allows
authorities to adjust data collection rates at different times of the day, at
different parts of city to have high quality coverage and understanding of the
phenomenon – for example traffic and noise. All this is done while being
cognizant of the preferences and context of the users.
Labels: big data, ibm research - india, Internet-of-Things, mobile