Human mobility data in the COVID-19 pandemic: characteristics, applications, and challenges

Figures & data

Table 1. Summary of human mobility datasets in recent COVID-19 studies.

Data Category		Name and Provider	Region and scale	Available Time	OD Flow	Availability	First release after COVID-19	Strengths	Weaknesses	Selected References
Public Transit System	Air flight	OpenSky-Network	Worldwide, mostly for Europe and North America	01/01/2019 ∼ present	Yes	Public	Yes	Detailed tracking information	API limitations	Zhuang et al. (2020); Iacus et al. (2020)
	Train	Transit system / dataset in different countries (e.g. China, U.S., Italy)	China, USA, Italy (by state, city, district)	Different for different regions	Yes	Public	No	Available in countries where there is a booking website	Real-time data but without history data or sometimes web crawling needed	Zhang et al. (2014); Cartenì, Di Francesco, and Martino (2021); Hu et al. (2020c)
	Metro	Transport authority (e.g. MATSim-NYC)	U.S.	Different for different regions	No	Public	No	Detailed ridership data, at the station level	Non-trackable; no route record	Zheng et al. (2020); Ahangari et al. (2020)
Social Activity		Apple Mobility Trends Report	Worldwide/city, county, state	04/14/2020 ∼ present	No	Public	Yes	global wide; one single file; data divided by country/region, sub-region, city	data source method (requests for directions in Apple Maps)	Huang et al. (2020b); Kurita et al. (2021); Hadjidemetriou et al. (2020)
		Google Mobility Reports	Worldwide/city, county, state	2/15/2020 ∼ present	No	Public	Yes	global wide; one single file	not comparable among countries	Pepe et al. (2020); Delen, Eryarsoy, and Davazdahemami (2020); Rutz et al. (2020)
		Foursquare Mobility Reports	U.S./county, state	02/19/202 ∼present.	No	Submit Application	Yes	Available in 25 types of POI and by age group	Only available in U.S.	Gao et al. (2020a); Fathi-Kazerooni et al. (2020)
		SafeGraph Mobility Reports	U.S./census tract, county, and state	01/01/2019 ∼ present	Yes	Submit Application	No	Varieties of data categories	Data are only available on Amazon S3	Li et al. (2020b); Kang et al. (2020)
Index-based Mobility Data		Cuebiq Mobility Index	U.S. at multiple geographic levels	01/01/2020	No	Submit Application	Yes	Available in DMA level; index allows counties to be compared to one another	Only available in U.S.	Fraiberger et al. (2020); Pepe et al. (2020)
		Baidu Mobility Index	China/city and province	1/1/2020 ∼ 5/7/2020 & 9/3/2020 ∼ present	Yes	Public	No	inter/intro-city mobility index	Not publicly accessible after 7 May 2020, only available for Mainland China	Ze-Liang et al. (2020); Liu et al. (2020a); Xu et al. (2020)
		Descartes Lab Mobility Index	U.S./county and state	03/01/2020 – present	No	Submit Application	Yes	accurate positioning data (m50 score based on normalization methods)	Inter-city index not covered; only freely available in a certain period of time and scale	Warren and Skillman (2020); Gao et al. (2020b); Chen et al. (2020)
		Unacast Social Distancing Index	U.S.	02/24/2020 ∼ present	No	Submit Application	Yes	Granular data, available down to specific data points; bias correction based on classifications of businesses	Since data is coming from third party sources, people may have to agree to consent on those sources	Brodeur, Cook, and Wright (2021)
		University of Maryland Mobility Metrics and Social Distancing Index	U.S./county and state	01/01/2020 ∼ present	No	Submit Application	Yes	Integrated and cleaned location data from multiple sources; be highly representative	Only available in the U.S.	Zhang et al. (2014); Ghader et al. (2020); Ghader et al. (2020)
		Camber Systems Social Distancing Reporter	U.S./county	08/01/2020 ∼ present	No	Submit Application	Yes	Integrating multiple data sources; less biased and more representative; easy to interpret	subject to calibration; only available in U.S. county level; no data before August 2020	Jeffrey et al. (2020)
Social Media-Derived Mobility Data		Geotagged Tweets	Worldwide/any spatiotemporal scale	01/01/2018 ∼ present	Yes	Public	No	Worldwide coverage, real-time, aggregation-flexible	Bias in population, low penetration	Huang et al. (2020a); Li et al. (2021b); Su et al. (2020a)
		Facebook Movement Range Maps	Worldwide	01/03/2020 ∼ present	No	Submit Application	Yes	Machine-readable format that is global and free of charge	Only provided by mobile phone users who have enabled location history	Lau et al. (2020); Kuchler, Russel, and Stroebel (2020); Beria and Lunkar (2021)

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Data availability statements

The public available mobility datasets, such as Google Community Mobility Report, Apple Mobility Data, Baidu Mobility Index, Foursquare Mobility Data, and Descartes Mobility Index, presented in the study are shared and updated by Spatial Data Lab at Harvard University on Harvard Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/data_ncov).