Urban sensing: Using smartphones for transportation mode classification

We present a prototype mobile phone application that implements a novel transportation mode detection algorithm. The application is designed to run in the background, and continuously collects data from built-in acceleration and network location sensors. The collected data is analysed automatically and partitioned into activity segments. A key finding of our work is that walking activity can be robustly detected in the data stream, which, in turn, acts as a separator for partitioning the data stream into other activity segments. Each vehicle activity segment is then sub-classified according to the vehicle type. Our approach yields high accuracy despite the low sampling interval and does not require GPS data. As a result, device power consumption is effectively minimized. This is a very crucial point for large-scale real-world deployment. As part of an experiment, the application has been used by 495 samples, and our prototype provides 82% accuracy in transportation mode classification for an experiment performed in Zurich, Switzerland. Incorporating location type information with this activity classification technology has the potential to impact many phenomena driven by human mobility and to enhance awareness of behavior, urban planning, and agent-based modeling.