Mobile Phone based Social Sensing
Of course, this is not easy. The sensors embedded in the phone have to be sampled often in order to capture the user's behaviour and clever algorithms/filtering etc have to be applied to the data to ascertain what people are doing. Researchers such as Rachuri (see links below) have worked on this for some time.
They have shown that you can use smartphones to perform social sensing such as capturing a user's emotions and speech patterns automatically, or detecting the collaboration and interaction patterns of people.
This project would focus on building on the work of Rachuri and others in this area. Read more here, here and here.
Problem
Most people now carry a smartphone. They have many sensors e.g. accelerometer, microphone, GPS. These can help capture social and behavioural aspects of their users. This 'social sensing' can help us learn more about what people are doing.