YOUR cellphone can track who your closest friends are 鈥� perhaps even better than you can.
of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and his colleagues handed out phones to 94 volunteers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The phones had logging software installed to track the volunteers鈥� calls, and their capability detected when they were in close proximity to one another.
By looking for patterns in the call logs and times when phones were close together, Eagle and his colleagues found they could predict who the volunteers identified as their friends with an accuracy of 95 per cent (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ).
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When it came to measuring the amount of time people spent in close proximity, the phones were more reliable than their owners. The volunteers tended to overestimate how much time they spent close to friends, and downplayed the amount of time they spent around more casual contacts.
The research could potentially be used to help epidemiologists predict how an infection like flu will spread from person to person.
