e-mission: An Open-Source, Smartphone Platform for Collecting Human Travel Data (original) (raw)

GPS-equipped smartphones provide new methods to collect data about travel behavior, including travel survey apps that incorporate automated location sensing. Previous approaches to this have involved proprietary or one-off tools that are inconsistent and difficult to evaluate. In contrast, e-mission is an open-source, extensible software platform that consists of ( a) an app for survey participants to install on their Android or iOS smartphones and ( b) cloud-hosted software for managing the collected data. e-mission collects continuous location data, user-initiated annotations, and responses to contextual, platform initiated survey questions. New studies can be set up using the existing University of California, Berkeley, infrastructure with no additional coding, or the platform can be extended for more complex projects. This paper reviews the requirements for smartphone travel data collection, describes the architecture and capabilities of the e-mission platform, and evaluates its...