Mobile Territorial Lab (MTL)

The Mobile Territorial Lab (MTL) aims at creating a “living” laboratory integrated in the real life of the Trento territory in Italy, open to manifold kinds of experimentations. In particular, the Lab is focused on exploiting the sensing capabilities of mobile phones to track and understand human behaviors (e.g., families spending behaviors, lifestyles, mood and stress patterns, etc.), on designing and testing social strategies aimed at empowering individual and collective lifestyles through attitude and behavior change, and on investigating new paradigms in personal data management and sharing. MTL has been created by Human Dynamics group, Telecom Italia SKIL Lab, Foundation Bruno Kessler and Telefonica I+D.

The data presents a valuable and unique source for investigating personal needs, community roles, phone usage patterns, etc. and for providing benefits to people in terms of personal, economic and social benefits.

MTL aims at exploiting smartphones' sensing capabilities to unobtrusively and cost-effectively access to previously inaccessible sources of data related to daily social behavior (location, physical proximity of other devices; communication data (phone calls and SMS), movement patterns, and so on. The Mobile Territorial Lab (MTL) in Trentino aims at fostering mobile phone related research activities with real people on a very responsive territory. This include the involvement of a significant number of committed users with the goal of having a continuous and active user base to interact with and cutting down the experimentation setup costs. Not only.

A continue and active user base equipped with smartphones, enabling users to access (from everywhere) online services and to collect personal or contextual information from the integrated sensors, represents a valuable and unique sample for investigating new paradigms in the management of personal data.