One of the key findings of SMU Associate Professor of Information Systems Archan Misra and his team’s research is that crowdsourcing programs work better when proactively offered to people that are best positioned to do them. They also established that bundling tasks together in nearby locations can improve efficiency. Associate Prof Misra believes that these insights can help improve both individual businesses and smart nation services. In the future, Associate Prof Misra is interested to explore whether crowdsourcing can be an effective tool for obtaining participatory feedback from residents (e.g., of a specific housing estate). One mobile sensing project he is especially excited about uses a smartwatch to keep track of food eaten. Keeping this “food diary” can help stave off weight gain, and see if one has irregular eating habits that harms one’s health. In the longer term, he expects that such personalised monitoring, when coupled with increasing availability of public information on food content (e.g., from fast food restaurants) will transform businesses ranging from restaurants to personalised wellness management. Looking ahead, Associate Prof Misra believes that physical analytics can be combined with social analytics, which is what people post on social media.
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