The Knight Foundation recently hosted a News Challenge in order to find up-and-coming innovative ideas pertaining to media. Among the winners, which were awarded $1.37 million in grants, was one particularly interesting platform called Behavio. The startup is an open source platform that turns phones into smart sensors of the real world behavior of consumers.

Although the Knight Foundation honored Behavio for the advancements it can make in journalism, the platform can actually be utilized in many other areas as well. As Nadav Aharony, the company’s co-founder, explained to us, the platform can actually “look at how communities live their lives.” In other words, it can detect how friendships are formed and how people make decisions.

The journalism implications are significant as well since the platform will be able to enhance the meaning of pictures. In addition, it opens the door for many others to contribute to a story.

Aharony told us that the platform began as an open source project at the MIT Media Lab Funf and then developed into Behavio. While the platform is still relatively new, he believes it has the ability to be used in many different industries, including healthcare. He expects that we will see apps and services that use the framework in the relatively near future.