In our age of data, almost everything we do is tracked, logged and primed for analysis. A new mobile app called funf is offering a platform for researchers looking to tap into just this.

Alex Pentland, part of the development team for the app, and director of MIT's Human Dynamics Lab, is a firm believer that it's the little things – the subtle social interactions that we leave behind – which can be the most revealing.

The MIT team created funf, a platform where anyone can create their own mobile research app that records and monitors small social interactions. Users check which bits of data they're looking to collect, then distribute the app out to research participants. Phone conversations are logged, SMS and email trails are stored, and locations and social proximity are monitored.

Through analysis of these interactions, Pentland believes we can better predict and understand hidden patterns in our social lives, and how trend adoption spreads. Pentland calls this type of capture and analysis 'Social fMRI', or 'Reality Mining', and believes everything from political views to obesity can be foreceast with fairly high certainty.

funf looks to offer a range of uses for researchers and developers. Even avid self-trackers – the pioneers of the Quantified Self trend – can use it to examine their habits or input the gathered data into another app of their preference.