Connected objects follow us everywhere and know everything about our lives. And companies collect this data to better understand the profile of their users and can even go so far as to predict their psychological profile, shows a UNIL study on connected watches.
Camille Cevey is currently preparing for the 20 km of Lausanne and her training always starts the same way: after a good lacing of the shoes, she takes a look at her connected watch. Because this student monitors her daily physical activity, her sleep and her menstrual cycles in particular.
“It’s more about quantifying and keeping a regularity, seeing that I’m making progress in terms of sleep, my steps, my physical activity. It also allows me to adapt my training, my hours of sleep, my other activities, to optimize them in order to achieve a specific objective”, she confides on Monday in the 7:30 p.m.
Establish psychological profiles
The student is one of 200 participants in the UNIL study, which is the first to link biometric data, such as gender, heart rate, sleep and number of steps collected by trackers. ‘activity. Collecting such results for four months allowed the researchers to determine major psychological profiles.
“Our participants took a personality test, made up of several hundred statements, with which they agreed or disagreed. Then, we did a strategic study looking for correlations between the scores obtained, the data physiological devices and connected watches”, explains Noé Zufferey, PhD student in the Department of Information Systems at UNIL.
Thus the number of steps, especially on Friday and Saturday evenings, and the variety of activities practiced tend to indicate an outgoing personality.
Higher step counts and poorer quality sleep are found in people who are less emotionally stable, more prone to anxiety.
Finally, more surprisingly, open-mindedness could also be deduced from the evolution of heart rate during the day.
Ethical issues
However, these easily collectable data raise ethical questions. “You can use a person’s personality traits to manipulate them, to send them propaganda messages or targeted , for example,” warns Noé Zufferey.
Every day, each person hands over immense amounts of personal data to others. It is therefore up to everyone to assess the consequences for their private sphere.
>> To go further, read:
Why the connected watch does not threaten the traditional watch
Report TV: Marie-Emilie Catier
Adaptation web: juma