The expectations from technology over the last decades in countries have increased drastically. The Increase can be attributed primarily to the efforts of medical practitioners ,Engineers and the growing consciousness to health, education and hygiene.
One of the prominent technologist, Claudia Villa longa said in her analysis on the understanding of human behaviour , she said that human behaviour has become one of the most promising research areas in health care.
The behaviours of humans are versatile and dynamic. The dynamism of human behaviour is generally influenced by the environment and background. It has been established from a research undertaken by various sociologist that proved that the environment affects life style of human. The effects can be physical, psychologically or socially .
In same run, technology has improved drastically , so many advances and improvement daily and one of the major impact of technology to the world is smart phones . The evolution of smart phones have been promising , in which it can recognize and detect human behaviour unobtrusively . The initial reason for the need for smart phones was to communicate and that produced a need to also understand human extensively through recognizing behaviour , identifying the differences and providing solutions to un healthy behaviours.
Due to the advances of smartphones, there have been consistent research on smart phones in relations to our health . It’s not because there are no hospitals to provide solutions, but there is a need to utilise an easy means to detecting unhealthy life style and also because the number of people who uses smartphones is very high.
In a proceedings by Kostas konsolaki, he stated that in 2016, there were 2.1 billion people using smart phones and now in 2020 , it has increased tob2.5 billion and the range keeps getting higher especially in the era of pandemic in which has changed the global economy and societal ways . Therefore the advances of smartphones in identifying behavioural differences is put into action.
Smartphones devices,aside from taking pictures, communicating and providing Internet services can also be used to track motion , orientation and position of their users body through multiple sensors. In other to understand the term “human behavioural differences ” , there must be an understanding of what human behavior means.
Human behaviour: it is the potential and expressed capacity of humans , It is also the response to internal or external stimuli. Human behaviour changes as one develops. The behavioural differences are the psychological features or traits that distinguish each persons.
How smart phones identify human behavioural differences:
Human behaviour differences are ubiquitous,and scientist have been able to identify and recognize the differences , dynamism and emotions of individuals. The recent technology advances have powerful specification, and enormous sensing possibilities.
The sensing modalities have been built to measure behaviour. From a briefing by Miriam vollen broek-hutten to technologist, she stated that the four sensing modalities exploited to date are presented in subsections, including the physical activity, cognitive , emotional and social sensing . An over view image of the existing studies by Miriam is seen below ..
The following below are specific ways of how smartphones identify human behavioural differences:
Physical activity sensing: the technicalities of smartphones have enabled it to be able to explore the physical activity .
several years back, monitoring of people were made through simple pedometers and step counters building on the acceleration measured through the built in sensors, but now smart phones alone monitors physical activity through detecting body movement , orientation, identifying abnormal physical behaviour especially fall movement transition and postural balance .
According to phithakkitnukoon, horanont, Lorenzo , shibqsaki and ratt proceedings on the use of smartphones, they described that smartphones can track physical activity which enables it to tell a difference in location due to the inbuilt accelerators, gyroscopes , magnetometers and GPS sensors . The GPS sensors have been the primary source for the widespread use of mobility analysis. Also, the signal strength of WiFi and Bluetooth makes it possible to detect location and current physical activity of the user, which makes it easier for phones to detect when used by another user.
Emotional sensing : The common method for smartphones to detect emotional behavior of user, is based on collation of users self data, through applications ,the applications then samples the data for monitoring when happy , sad or relaxing . Smart phones not just could tell emotional differences but could prescribe solutions or give the solutions to an emotional imbalance . In most cases, you find it applicable to hospitals in which they use in predicting which patient has mental disorders, bipolar etc.
In an analysis by Amrich and Troster on using phones to sense emotions, they examined phone calls parameters and showed that phone call duration and accumulated time taken can be used to predict the emotional behavior disorder significantly.
Dingler, made a machine learning approach in smartphones that automatically, identify users boredom from phone , it can tell how introverted or extroverted an individual is . The machine has enabled smartphones to tell the difference.
Social activity sensing : Social apps on phones have enabled smartphones identifying social behavioural differences, this is made possible through users actions, post, comments , sentiments and searches which could be examined to extract useful information. From a movie titled jexi which is a mirror image of how our phones operate when giving the command , can have access to all a user can be and do through the activity on social media. Lan et Al said in his briefing that the era we are in , is an era where smartphones measure social isolation based on the total duration of using smart phones.
In final note, this is an era of flexibility, where all you need and what you need can be accessed in seconds, the concept of human behaviour can easily be decoded using smartphones and in the next two to three years , the new generations of smartphones will be more than just identifying human behaviour but can predict human behaviour .
