Simon Hendery: Technology not to be sneezed at

Cellphones could be a valuable tool in predicting influenza breakouts says Nokia's chief development officer.

A talk this week on the future of mobile phones by Nokia's chief development officer, Mary McDowell, quickly diverted on to the seemingly unrelated topic of the moment: swine flu.

"We didn't know this would be so relevant as it is today, but you can start to track influenza by having temperature sensors on [mobile phone] devices," McDowell told journalists in Singapore.

"So if you notice a rise in temperature in a particular town, or even a few square blocks of a city, you can start to predict that there is likely to be an influenza epidemic."

In other words a thermometer on a cellphone could be used to check how warm a user's palms are. Because the device also knows through GPS technology where that person is, it could then feed the information back to a central database keeping tabs on potential flu outbreaks.

"Over the next five years you will see all kinds of sensors go into mobile devices. These things are getting cheaper and much more reliable and they'll become a much more pervasive part of the hardware," McDowell said.

"More and more you're going to see sensors built into the device that will allow this mass data collection and predictive capabilities."

As the executive vice-president in charge of developing Nokia's corporate strategy and overseeing the company's research centre, New York-based McDowell's role includes charting technology development work as far as six years ahead.

Gazing into the future today, the concept of "using the phone as a sensor" is looming large inside Nokia's crystal ball.

"And we think this holds tremendous potential in terms of public health and safety [and other] benefits at a community level."

Frustrated Auckland motorists will be interested to learn that one application for this type of mass cellphone-based monitoring - and the one McDowell says will be the first to become a reality - involves analysing, and ultimately reducing, traffic congestion.

Nokia has been working on a research project with the US Department of Transportation and the University of California, Berkley, which has involved giving drivers of thousands of cars GPS-equipped devices which capture details of their travels, and then using the data to predict traffic flows.

She says the traditional approach to traffic monitoring has been to install sensors on the road. But that approach is expensive, and means less-busy routes are not monitored, so a full picture of vehicle flows doesn't emerge.

Switching to monitoring GPS-enabled phones in people's cars is a cheaper alternative and "is something we can do on a mass scale" as GPS technology becomes more common in phones. This type of mass population monitoring always conjures up Orwellian-related fears around privacy invasion so McDowell is quick to say measures are in place to ensure the data collected can not be surreptitiously used to identify individuals' movements.

Nokia, of course, is not just interested in mass monitoring because of its potential use as a tool for enhancing public safety and bettering the community. There is a business case behind its research.

The global phone giant's navigation technology subsidiary, Navtec, owns US traffic website traffic.com and McDowell says Navtec is "very keen about the ability of this technology to really lower the cost of providing up-to-date and accurate traffic information".

Across the wider Nokia group, there is also a move to cash in on consumers' increasing reliance on the mobile phone as a social tool.

McDowell gave this week's presentation on Nokia's glimpse into the future during a company briefing for Asia-Pacific media and analysts. Nokia's online "services" brand, Ovi, was given a major push at the event. Ovi is a web and mobile device-based platform for music downloads, file sharing and social interaction which the company hopes will capture the average phone user's imagination as they seek to do and interact with others more through their mobiles.

The Singapore event was also an opportunity for Nokia to hype its latest phones, including the flagship top-of-the-line, do-everything N97, which is due to be launched in New Zealand next month.

McDowell said its raft of features made the N97 Nokia's first device in a new "computer" category, putting it in a class ahead of the company's other handsets which were either "phones" or "smartphones".

Impressive though its list of features is, the N97 still lacks both a palm monitoring thermometer to check your health and the capability to automatically beam your vehicular movements to some omniscient traffic-monitoring super computer in the sky.

But judging by McDowell's comments both bits of technology may be close at hand. Perhaps we'll see them included in the next iteration of Nokia's super-phone - the N98 perhaps? - which will no doubt appear next year.

* Simon Hendery travelled to Singapore as a guest of Nokia.