Not all those who Wander are lost: exploring human mobility using a smartphone application

ABSTRACT

Since the 1970s, activity diaries have been the principal source of data used by geographers and urban planners to capture human mobility patterns; however, memory recall requirements and participant burden are limiting features of this approach. While handheld GPS devices were initially used to simply validate activity diaries, the ubiquity of smartphones makes GPS-based technology a viable alternative for collecting human mobility data. This research visualises human mobility patterns using spatiotemporally GPS-rich traces collected from 24 participants during a pilot study of a new smartphone application—Wander. The results illustrate the utility of such data for capturing individuals’ multi-nodal activity spaces to better understand people–place interactions in the context of increasingly fluid and mobile lifestyles. Finally, we draw on our experiences of implementing this pilot study to discuss the benefits and limitations of this technology for its broader application in domains such as transportation planning, tourism management, and in the management of crime and disorder.

KEYWORDS:

• Human mobility
• GPS
• smartphone app
• spatiotemporal patterns
• land use

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr Behrang Assemi for developing the software used to collect the mobility traces, Lauren Jessup for involvement in participant recruitment, and Anthony Kimpton for help processing data in Stata.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Rosabella Borsellino http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7046-882X

Renee Zahnow http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5796-9443

Jonathan Corcoran http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3565-6061

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [Grant Number DP150101293].