Sensing Human Activity: GPS Tracking

Abstract

The enhancement of GPS technology enables the use of GPS devices not only as navigation and orientation tools, but also as instruments used to capture travelled routes: as sensors that measure activity on a city scale or the regional scale. TU Delft developed a process and database architecture for collecting data on pedestrian movement in three European city centres, Norwich, Rouen and Koblenz, and in another experiment for collecting activity data of 13 families in Almere (The Netherlands) for one week. The question posed in this paper is: what is the value of GPS as ‘sensor technology’ measuring activities of people? The conclusion is that GPS offers a widely useable instrument to collect invaluable spatial-temporal data on different scales and in different settings adding new layers of knowledge to urban studies, but the use of GPS-technology and deployment of GPS-devices still offers significant challenges for future research.

Computational Streetscapes

“…Big data are "big" with regard to streetscape science in a few key ways. First, many data sources for streetscape dynamics now present vistas that can often cover almost entire populations of streets, and in some instances the data represent populations of walkers spanning several blocks [272][273][274][275]. Data that are "big" in this way allow model-builders (at least theoretically) to move away from sampling small windows of streetscape activity and away from coarse statistical modeling of likely or probable populations of walkers and activities.…”

Visualization of Vessel Traffic

“…In this use case we analyze pedestrian movements as an urban planner [149]. We take a look at a data set of pedestrian movements in the city center of Delft over a period of four days.…”

“…(A) A coarse sampling of two lesser black-backed gulls [136]. (B) A fine sampling of three pedestrians in the city center of Delft [149].…”

Intelligent Event Management with Bluetooth Sensor Networks

“…Figure 1 shows the hardware components used in the Bluetooth tracking methodology. A Bluetooth scanner is actually a combination of a computational unit running the scanning software and processing and storing the results (1), a power source (2), and a USB cable (3) to connect the computational unit with a Bluetooth sensor (4)(5). The heart of the computational unit is an ALIX motherboard (alix2d2, alix3d2, alix6f2), equipped with a 1GB CompactFlash card for storing log files.…”

“…One specific type of information is location, and a large focus in SCI is indeed reserved for studying human mobility. Several methodologies and technologies have been used in order to extract mobility information from mobile devices ranging from mining data logs of mobile phone operators [2], [3], to the use of the global positioning system (GPS) technology [4]. Less evident, Bluetooth has also recently been proposed as a valuable alternative tracking technology in different domains such as urban design [5] and social studies [6].…”