Google Location History Data and its Potential for Activity Space Research
Understanding human spatial behavior is critical for urban planning, understanding social disparities, and monitoring public health. To answer a range of questions, researchers have relied on studying activity spaces enabled by fine-grained location data (FGLD). However, the availability of FGLD entails high researcher and participant burden incurred by the tools typically used to capture them (e.g. self-reported travel diary surveys, lightweight GPS surveys, smartphone travel survey applications). Meanwhile, the Google Maps application has ready-built infrastructure that can passively collect, manage and store FGLD collected by participant-owned smartphones as a potential source of low-burden FGLD. These FGLD are called Google Location History (GLH) data. At the same time, the temporal and spatial accuracy of GLH data are variable, and sensitive to smartphone hardware, software, configuration, and user habits. Using GLH and travel diary data collected from 9 undergraduate students over 18 days, we show that GLH data converged towards complete activity spaces within a period of two weeks. This was done by comparing the trends at which marginal information gain to cumulative spatial histograms become negligible according to a pairwise Kullback-Leibler analysis. All 5 Android OS devices recorded GLH data with no technical disruptions while 4 of 8 iOS devices failed to record some or all GLH data during the data collection timeframe. These findings provide evidence that cumulatively aggregated GLH data from Android OS devices can be used by researchers as an accessible and methodologically efficient source of FGLD for activity space research.
- Record URL:
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AEP25 Standing Committee on Travel Survey Methods.
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Corporate Authors:
Transportation Research Board
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Authors:
- McCallum, Scott Christian
- Patterson, Zachary
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 100th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2021-1-5 to 2021-1-29
- Date: 2021
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 13p
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Location data; Smartphones; Spatial analysis; Travel behavior; Travel surveys
- Identifier Terms: Google Maps
- Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Transportation (General);
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01764152
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: TRBAM-21-01464
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Feb 4 2021 11:00AM