SocialCircuits : a platform for measuring social interaction using smartphones

Abstract

SocialCircuits is a platform capable of measuring the face-to-face and phone-based communication network of a real-world community. This platform uses commodity mobile phones to measure social ties between individuals, and uses long- and short-term surveys to measure the shifts in individual habits, opinions, health, and friendships influenced by those ties. The flagship experiment using this platform is a yearlong study of an MIT undergraduate dormitory. Some of the key challenges met in building and deploying the platform were mobile phone hardware and software selection, privacy considerations, community selection and recruitment, and minimizing data loss.