From location tracking to personalized eco-feedback: A framework for geographic information collection, processing and visualization to promote sustainable mobility behaviors

Abstract Nowadays, most people carry around a powerful smartphone which is well suited to constantly monitor the location and sometimes even the activity of its user. This makes tracking prevalent and leads to a large number of projects concerned with trajectory data. One area of particular interest is transport and mobility, where data is important for urban planning and smart city-related activities, but can also be used to provide individual users with feedback and suggestions for personal behavior change. As part of a large-scale study based in Switzerland, we use activity tracking data to provide people with eco-feedback on their own mobility patterns and stimulate them to adopt more energy-efficient mobility choices. In this paper we explore the opportunities offered by smartphone based activity tracking, propose a general framework to exploit location data to foster more sustainable mobility behavior, describe the technical solutions chosen and discuss a range of outcomes in terms of user perception and sustainability potential. The presented approach extracts mobility patterns from users’ trajectories, computes credible alternative transport options, and presents the results in a concise and clear way. The resulting eco-feedback helps people to understand their mobility choices, discover the most non-ecological parts of their travel behavior, and explore feasible alternatives.

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