Exploiting Fitness Apps for Sustainable Mobility - Challenges Deploying the GoEco! App
Dominik Benjamin Bucher, Francesca Cellina, Francesca Mangili, Martin Raubal, Roman Rudel, Andrea Emilio Rizzoli, Omar Elabed · 2016
The large interest in analyzing one's own fitness led to the development of more and more powerful smartphone applications.Most are capable of tracking a user's position and mode of locomotion, data that do not only reflect personal health, but also mobility choices.A large field of research is concerned with mobility analysis and planning for a variety of reasons, including sustainable transport.Collecting data on mobility behavior using fitness tracker apps is a tempting choice, because they include many of the desired functions, most people own a smartphone and installing a fitness tracker is quick and convenient.However, as their original focus is on measuring fitness behavior, there are a number of difficulties in their usage for mobility tracking.In this paper we denote the various challenges we faced when deploying GoEco!Tracker (an app using the Moves R fitness tracker to collect mobility measurements), and provide an analysis on how to best overcome them.Finally, we summarize findings after one month of large scale testing with a few hundred users within the GoEco!living lab performed in Switzerland.