Darren Twiss

There is always much talk about the humble mobile as “The remote control to our lives”. Well that’s a bit ambiguous, exactly what is it the remote control for? Well here is a bit of a glimpse into the future.

MIT’s Technology Review has just published a list of the 10 Emerging Technologies for 2008, [thanks to About Mobility for the heads-up].

“Reality Mining”, as you might expect for an Emerging Technology is a broad field. The basic idea is that as we go about our daily lives we leave/have available bits of information which can be used (through techniques like data mining) to determine various relationships about what we are doing, who we are and/or contribute to a better understanding or measurement of the world around us.

In mobile design the idea of Mobile Context is probably a subset of Reality Mining.

The MIT article gives a couple of interesting examples from suggesting things to do or new people to meet, automatically determining privacy settings, determining a better understanding of the spread of diseases or even using built in accelerometers to detect the onset of Parkinson’s disease. The possibilities are really exciting and is really only made possible by the ubiquity of mobile device technology.

My view is that the mobile handset is the “Front End” or “User Interface” for a data-rich or augmented world. I think the “Back End” is going to be a the various pieces of computing intelligence embedded within our environment (like Wireless Sensor Networks, i.e ZigBee) that collect and process data and communicate it back to the “Front End”. The applications for which will be a mix or personal, commercial and environmental factors.

Exciting Stuff.

[Updated: Links to more ideas or exmaples ]