Reliable systems and mechanisms for charting patterns, habits and movements of crowds have been of interest to researchers for years. One crowd pattern of dubious value to researchers was the persistent tale municipal sewerage systems being damaged by widespread simultaneous use during popular television broadcast such as the final episode of M*A*S*H and the Super bowl. This story has largely been debunked.
A more hopeful area may be cell phone usage patterns which are now being studied to using new techniques.
Disease outbreak change mobility patterns and now an MIT researcher has developed a software system to monitor cell phone data looking to track flu outbreaks by changes in the patterns of phone calls and text messaging.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827824.800-cellphones-reveal-emerging-disease-outbreaks.html
Epidemiologists know that disease outbreaks change mobility patterns, but until now have been unable to track these patterns in any detail. So Madan and colleagues gave cellphones to 70 students in an undergraduate dormitory. The phones came with software that supplied the team with anonymous data on the students' movements, phone calls and text messages. The students also completed daily surveys on their mental and physical health.
A characteristic signature of illness emerged from the data, which was gathered over a 10-week period in early 2009.Students who came down with a fever or full-blown flu tended to move around less and make fewer calls late at night and early in the morning. When Madan trained software to hunt for this signature in the cellphone data, a daily check correctly identified flu victims 90 per cent of the time.
Public health officials could also use the technique to spot emerging outbreaks of illness ahead of conventional detection systems, which today rely on reports from doctors and virus-testing labs. Similar experiments in larger groups and in different communities will have to be done first though.
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