Track me! a web based location tracking and analysis system for smart phone users

Abstract

Mobility information of cell phone users is very important for wide range of applications, including context-based search and advertising, early warning systems, city-wide sensing applications such as air pollution exposure estimation and traffic planning. With the inclusion of new technologies in the cell phone hardware such as built-in GPS and 802.11 supports, mobility information are easily captured, managed and forwarded to a remote system via opportunistic connections over Internet. However, it is very difficult to use these low level location data for practical applications due to lack of sufficient information including high level location and temporal data. In order to solve this problem, we propose a Web Based Mobility Analysis System which collects location data from cell phone users via opportunistic Internet connections and convert these low level location data to high level mobility information as well as adding a temporal dimension. In our experiments, we have illustrated the benefits of our systems on the Reality Mining data set which contains 350K hours of real cell tower connection data.