A Review on the State-of-the-Art Smartphone Apps for Travel Data Collection and Energy Efficient Strategies

Travel data collection on how people move in time and space has long been an important subject for transportation planning. Traditionally, travel data collection relies upon self-reports from the respondents. Usually, these data collection methods share some common drawbacks including respondent fatigue, missing trips, increasing costs, and declining response rates. To overcome above insufficiencies, smartphone-based surveys have emerged as a promising alternative in recent years to collect travel data and a number of such smartphone apps with different functionalities have been developed and implemented for different purposes. However, regarding the real-world implementation of apps, there are still challenges to be addressed. One fundamental concern is the battery power consumption. Since the battery power depletes rapidly from frequent and continuous operation of multiple sensors, especially the GPS receiver, the inconvenience caused by frequent battery recharge often drives away users and offsets the potential benefits of using those apps. This issue has not yet been systematically explored in the literature on travel data collection. This paper seeks to update the current knowledge of positioning and motion detection technologies on the existing apps for travel data collection and provide a state of the art discussion on the various strategies that can be implemented to preserve battery power on the smartphones.

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• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABJ40 Standing Committee on Travel Survey Methods.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Liao, Chen-Fu
  • Chen, Cynthia
  • Fan, Yingling
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
• Date: 2017

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: References; Tables;
• Pagination: 20p
• Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Data collection; Detection and identification systems; Electric batteries; Energy consumption; Global Positioning System; Mobile applications; Smartphones; Travel surveys
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01622716
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 17-00436
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Jan 19 2017 9:12AM