Wander: a smartphone app for sensing sociability

Abstract

This paper presents a new smartphone application, Wander, to capture high resolution space-time information on urban dwellers. We detail both the mechanism as well as the analytic platform through which broad scale spatial mobility studies can be mounted to reveal how individuals move through spaces and interact with the social and physical elements of urban life. Results demonstrate the utility of Wander for collecting spatial mobility data that for the first time enables empirical testing of theories first forwarded by urban sociologists at the turn of the 20th Century. We use data collected through the Wander application to examine the timing and regularity of spatial mobility patterns, how these are related to particular urban features, and differ by participant characteristics