Social sensing: Obesity, unhealthy eating and exercise in face-to-face networks
Name
Pentland_Social Sensing Obesity.pdf
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530.71 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
529cc68c05552b916922950a24a8bec6
Author(s)
Madan, Anmol Prem Prakash
Moturu, Sai T.
Lazer, David
Pentland, Alex Paul
Date Issued
October 2010
Journal
Wireless Health '10
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Citation
Madan, Anmol et al. “Social Sensing.” Wireless Health 2010 on - WH ’10. San Diego, California, 2010. 104.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
What is the role of face-to-face interactions in the diffusion of health-related behaviors- diet choices, exercise habits, and long-term weight changes? We use co-location and communication sensors in mass-market mobile phones to model the diffusion of health-related behaviors via face-to-face interactions amongst the residents of an undergraduate residence hall during the academic year of 2008--09. The dataset used in this analysis includes bluetooth proximity scans, 802.11 WLAN AP scans, calling and SMS networks and self-reported diet, exercise and weight-related information collected periodically over a nine month period. We find that the health behaviors of participants are correlated with the behaviors of peers that they are exposed to over long durations. Such exposure can be estimated using automatically captured social interactions between individuals. To better understand this adoption mechanism, we contrast the role of exposure to different sub-behaviors, i.e., exposure to peers that are obese, are inactive, have unhealthy dietary habits and those that display similar weight changes in the observation period. These results suggest that it is possible to design self-feedback tools and real-time interventions in the future. In stark contrast to previous work, we find that self-reported friends and social acquaintances do not show similar predictive ability for these social health behaviors.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/1921081.1921094
