Where Google Maps Doesn’t Go: Mobility Decisions of People in Underserved Neighborhoods †

Abstract

There are currently many applications to assist in navigating urban spaces. However, in underserved regions where even the most essential urban infrastructure is lacking, these applications are not appropriate either because the zone has not been properly mapped, or because important information such as informal routes or semantic knowledge about the region is not considered. Based on a contextual study, we implemented a system to run crowdsensing campaigns with the neighbors and document their mobility decisions; the system also included functionalities to map and analyze the collected geolocated information. An important finding was that the actual routes taken during their daily mobility differ from the routes suggested by typical navigation applications. This also helped to inform the design of a system to provide navigation aids considering the specific context of the region.

Crowdsensing for Characterizing Mobility and Its Impact on the Subjective Wellbeing in an Underdeveloped Region

“…Our platform uses a client-server architecture following a disconnected data model, as shown in Figure 1. Here, we provide a summary describing our platform and refer the reader to [22,23] for more detailed information.…”