Human mobility trace acquisition and social interactions monitoring for business intelligence using smartphones

Human mobility monitoring and respective traces are important for understanding human behavior, respective patterns and associated context. Such data can be potentially used in business intelligence-oriented systems, for providing added value commercial services or insight to internal enterprise procedures. At the same time, smart phones are rapidly becoming an indispensable tool for our everyday life, while their advanced networking and computing capabilities are increasingly being used as enablers for new applications. We discuss here a system using a stable computing and networking infrastructure along with smart phone applications, based on commodity technologies, meant to be deployed rapidly and provide analytics almost in real-time for such aspects. We also discuss a related scenario in order to provide insight as to where our system could be used. We briefly present the deployment of our system in two settings, an office building and a research exhibition event, along with our experiences. Our findings show that it is feasible and efficient to deploy and operate our system relatively easy, producing meaningful data.