Challenges and Potential Opportunities of Mobile Phone Call Detail Records in Health Research: Review.

Despite various challenges and limitations, anonymized mobile phone CDRs have been used successfully in health research. The use of aggregated data is a safeguard but also a further limitation. Greater opportunities could be gained if validated anonymized CDRs were integrated with routine health records at an individual level, provided that permissions and safeguards could be put in place. Further work is needed, including gaining public views, to develop an ethically founded framework for the use of CDRs in health research.