Inferring transportation mode from smartphone sensors: Evaluating the potential of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

PLoS One. 2020 Jul 2;15(7):e0234003. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0234003. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

Understanding which transportation modes people use is critical for smart cities and planners to better serve their citizens. We show that using information from pervasive Wi-Fi access points and Bluetooth devices can enhance GPS and geographic information to improve transportation detection on smartphones. Wi-Fi information also improves the identification of transportation mode and helps conserve battery since it is already collected by most mobile phones. Our approach uses a machine learning approach to determine the mode from pre-prepocessed data. This approach yields an overall accuracy of 89% and average F1 score of 83% for inferring the three grouped modes of self-powered, car-based, and public transportation. When broken out by individual modes, Wi-Fi features improve detection accuracy of bus trips, train travel, and driving compared to GPS features alone and can substitute for GIS features without decreasing performance. Our results suggest that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can be useful in urban transportation research, for example by improving mobile travel surveys and urban sensing applications.

Publication types

  • Comparative Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Accelerometry / instrumentation*
  • Automobile Driving
  • City Planning*
  • Denmark
  • Geographic Information Systems
  • Humans
  • Motor Vehicles
  • Railroads
  • Smartphone* / instrumentation
  • Supervised Machine Learning*
  • Transportation*
  • Urban Population
  • Walking
  • Wireless Technology*

Grants and funding

ABN, DDL, KRM, SL acknowledge funding from Kraks Fond - Institute for Urban Economic Research (URL: https://kraksfondbyforskning.dk/en/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.