We live in an increasingly trackable world. Between fitness bands, smartwatches, beacons, and the rest of the whozits and whatnots that make up our built world, it’s becoming possible to use data to piece together a surprisingly complete picture about who we are, what we do, and even how hard our hearts are pumping blood through our veins.
Now, I’m not here to talk about the privacy or security implications of this new world (there’s plenty of chatter on that elsewhere). Instead, I’d like to put forward a positive take: It could be a real boon to science and research.
Studying people and their habits is always tricky. We humans don’t live our lives in labs, and conducting experiments in these sterile settings—where subjects know they are being watched—has the potential to really mess with researchers' results.
Assuming the data these devices collect is lab-quality (if it isn’t now, the never-ending march of technological advancement essentially ensures that it will be soon), the ability to track and measure test subjects with low-cost consumer electronics could allow researchers the sort of 24/7 look at our lives they have long sought. And while test subjects will still know they are being watched (assuming nobody is in serious breach of basic research protocols), there’s a big difference between casually having this knowledge in the back of your mind, and staring into the abyss of a lab’s one-way mirror while somebody tells you to act normal.
“Just like in physics, the act of observation can change the behavior of the observed, whether it’s a subatomic particle or a fourteen year old listening to
And while this study has an obvious marketing purpose in that it shows that streaming songs from services such as Apple Music and hardware partner Sonos can be good for you, what’s really interesting is how it was conducted: Apple Watches, iPhones, and iBeacons were used to track participants’ heart rate, physical activity, and position in the house. “What this study has shown us is that with a relatively small investment in lightweight, easy-to-install equipment, we can obtain a level of experimental rigor we get in the lab, without having to leave people’s home," Levitin says.
The study only entered the homes of 30 families (no surprise: they seemed to be more active and happy when they were able to listen to music), but it's not hard to imagine a world in which researchers use this technology to efficiently conduct the sort of large-scale studies that often prove prohibitively expensive. In other words, being able to measure thousands—or even millions—of subjects ensures that a researcher's sample size is way beyond statistically significant.
