Smartphone smarter to reveal your clues

Los Angeles: The molecules that you leave on your smartphone can be used to construct your personalised lifestyle ‘read-out’ — including diet, preferred hygiene products, health status and locations visited, a new study suggests.

By sampling the molecules on cell phones, researchers at University of California San Diego in the US were able to construct lifestyle sketches for each phone’s owner. The study could have a number of applications, including criminal profiling, airport screening, medication adherence monitoring, clinical trial participant stratification and environmental exposure studies, researchers said.

“You can imagine a scenario where a crime scene investigator comes across a personal object — like a phone, pen or key — without fingerprints or DNA, or with prints or DNA not found in the database,” said Pieter Dorrestein, professor in UC San Diego School of Medicine and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

“So we thought what if we take advantage of left-behind skin chemistry to tell us what kind of lifestyle this person has?” Mr Dorrestein said. “We realised we could probably come up with a profile of a person’s lifestyle based on chemistries we can detect on objects they frequently use,” he said.

Thirty-nine healthy adult volunteers participated in study. The team swabbed four spots on each person’s cell phoneand eight spots on each person’s right hand, for a total of nearly 500 samples.