How You Move And Use Your Smartphone Can Reflect Your Overall Personality

Our phones can give people with the right tools an uncomfortable amount of information about us. Calls and messages can indicate who your main contacts are, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Apparently even your accelerometer can snitch on you.

Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) have used the tiny sensors in smartphones that track movement to predict five key personality traits in a person.

In a paper published by the IEEE Computer Society, the researchers explain how this works. The accelerometers can show how fast a smartphone user walks, and how often they pick up the device during the night. By correlating this physical activity to personality traits, team can extrapolate a vague idea of what kind of person you are.

For instance, people with random activity patterns that seem busy on the weekends and weekday evenings are likely "agreeable" and extroverted. Others that have more predictable physical patterns are likely more introverted.

Similarly, sensitive women are more likely to check their phones regularly and well into the night, but sensitive males are more likely to do the opposite. And more inventive and curious people make and receive fewer phone calls compared to others.

According to the researchers, this data can be used to better inform friend recommendations on social networks, online dating matches, and targeted advertising. That's probably a bit discomfiting to many of you. After all, you don't necessarily want the likes of Facebook to know about your lifestyle.

However, the scientists say another possible benefit this research could have is self-improvement. According to them, it could help you better understand yourself, and for instance the fact that you're lonely is because you don't make an effort to deviate from your routine and go out.

There are of course some holes in the study, like the fact that it only focused on 52 people for the study, a very small sample size. They do however plan to replicate their study in Australia to confirm. Either way though, you can probably expect social networks and the like to make use of this in future.