Inferring transportation mode from smartphone sensors:Evaluating the potential of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

Understanding which transportation modes people use is critical for smart cities and planners to better serve their citizens. We show that using information from pervasive Wi-Fi access points and Bluetooth devices can enhance GPS and geographic information to improve transportation detection on smartphones. Wi-Fi information also improves the identification of transportation mode and helps conserve battery since it is already collected by most mobile phones. Our approach uses a machine learning approach to determine the mode from pre-prepocessed data. This approach yields an overall accuracy of 89% and average F1 score of 83% for inferring the three grouped modes of self-powered, car-based, and public transportation. When broken out by individual modes, Wi-Fi features improve detection accuracy of bus trips, train travel, and driving compared to GPS features alone and can substitute for GIS features without decreasing performance. Our results suggest that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can be useful in urban transportation research, for example by improving mobile travel surveys and urban sensing applications

Approaching location-based services from a place-based perspective: from data to services?

Despite the seemingly obvious importance of a link between notions of place and the provision of context in location-based services (LBS), truly place-based LBS remain rare. Place is attractive as a concept for designing services as it focuses on ways in which people, rather than machines, represent and talk about places. We review papers which have extracted place-relevant information from a variety of sources, examining their rationales, the data sources used, the characteristics of the data under study and the ways in which place is represented. Although the data sources used are subject to a wide range of biases, we find that existing methods and data sources are capable of extracting a wide range of place-related information. We suggest categories of LBS which could profit from such information, for example, by using place-related natural language (e.g. vernacular placenames) in tracking and routing services and moving the focus from geometry to place semantics in location-based retrieval. A key future challenge will be to integrate data derived from multiple sources if we are to advance from individual case studies focusing on a single aspect of place to services which can deal with multiple aspects of place

A Space Time Alarm

Many modern mobile communication devices are equipped with a global positioning systems (GPS) receiver and a navigation tool. These devices are useful when a user seeks to reach a specified destination as soon as possible, but may not be so when he/she only needs to arrive at the destination in time and wants to focus on some activities on the way. To deal with this latter situation, a method and device called “Space Time Alarm” is presented for helping the user reach the destination by a specified deadline. It does so by continuously and efficiently computing how much more time the user may stay at his/her current location without failing to reach the destination by the deadline. Advantage of this approach is that it works completely in the background so that the user’s en route activities will not be interfered with.QC 20150420</p

A Space Time Alarm

Many modern mobile communication devices are equipped with a global positioning systems (GPS) receiver and a navigation tool. These devices are useful when a user seeks to reach a specified destination as soon as possible, but may not be so when he/she only needs to arrive at the destination in time and wants to focus on some activities on the way. To deal with this latter situation, a method and device called “Space Time Alarm” is presented for helping the user reach the destination by a specified deadline. It does so by continuously and efficiently computing how much more time the user may stay at his/her current location without failing to reach the destination by the deadline. Advantage of this approach is that it works completely in the background so that the user’s en route activities will not be interfered with.QC 20150420</p