Cell phones making sense, as sensors

CNN) -- When you go shopping in a mall, you create an invisible path as you head from one store to another. For the manager of a mall, it would be useful to see the paths made by you and hundreds of other shoppers over time. Now, there's a tool for detecting those paths: the cell phone.

"Anywhere where there are flows, there will be applications. Mass transit operations will be a prime user of this type of technology to monitor flows of commuters at hubs and interchanges."

Path Intelligence, a startup in the UK, says it's in talks with airports, museums and amusement parks, among others. They're interested in its FootPath system, which lets them track cell phones (and anonymous customers) through their public places.

Cell phones, it appears, might be ideal for tracking movement patterns in certain situations, but what if they can detect environmental conditions?