Digital technologies provide the opportunity to quantify important human behaviors and have revolutionized how we think about human mobility and proximity, opening new research avenues for computational social science, urban mobility, computational epidemiology, and public health. In this talk, we will review the experience of the SocioPatterns collaboration, a decade-long effort to study human close-range proximity networks using wearable sensors. We will discuss the evolution of measurement technology and the lessons learned from data collection experiences in real-world environments that span schools, hospitals, households, low-resource rural settings, and more. We will close by discussing the design of targeted mitigation strategies for epidemic processes, including app-based digital contact tracing, and illustrating ongoing work that combines microbiome data and close-range proximity.