School of Computing, Communications and Electronics

University of Plymouth

This project is related to Location Based Services (LBS) – which attempt to provide services to users of mobile devices, based upon their current geographic location (e.g. details of special offers when someone is near to a particular shop). At present, such recommendations only take into account the current position of the user, and can often lead to unwanted and inappropriate recommendations because they are made independently of other contextual factors. Current PhD research aims to investigate whether recommendations can be improved by also using knowledge of users’ past movement patterns. Specifically, it will investigate whether the (regular) geographical movement patterns of users can be used to influence and inform location-based recommendations. One of the fundamental issues here is to determine how regular users’ movement patterns actually are. It is this aspect that the study seeks to investigate.

Participants will be required to use a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking device (or their own GPS device) and record their movement patterns during a typical week. Appropriate settings for such devices will be described to the user. The resulting data contains only waypoints and no information which allows the participant to be identified. Besides setting a device to a recording mode and carrying it with them, the user is not required to conduct any other activity during the trial.

As a baseline, participants will be asked to be involved for a working week (i.e. Monday to Friday), but will be given the opportunity to participate for longer periods if they are willing (up to an upper limit of a month).

At the end of the collection period the results can be submitted anonymously via a web-based file upload facility. After the anonymous upload of the data, the participant will be asked for brief anonymous information about themselves (age range, location, gender) and will be given an opportunity to offer their opinions about the experiment (via a Web form). No other feedback from participants is required.

This study will contribute towards PhD research that is assessing whether users show geographical regular movement patterns which could be used for location based recommendation.

All results from the study will be used and reported anonymously in the ongoing research.

Participants will be given an opportunity to find out the results of the study by receiving a copy of the findings. To request a copy of the results the participants will find a link to a web page where the results will be posted after the upload of their data. By copying this link they can later anonymously visit this page to get their copy of the results.

Technical setting

If you want to participate please record your daily movements with a GPS tracker / data logger device. As there are many different GPS systems available I can only give these general instructions about the settings (please refer to the manual of your GPS device on how to do these settings):

• set your recording mode to record either one way point every minute or if there is a change in the position / location bigger then 50 meters / 55 yards
  
• record the way points in a "standard" format like NMEA
  
• create a readme text file which describes the settings you have used - in addition I would like to ask you to include the following information: 
  
  
• Format used for recording (like NMEA, Garmin, ...)
• Number of days participated
• Gender (male / female)
• Age range (16-25, 26-35, 36-..., ...)
• Country you are living in
  
• Any comments you would like to make
  
 

• use a standard zip tool to zip all recorded files and the readme together

Once you finished recording please go to this page again and upload your zip file. After the upload you will get a URL shown where you will be able to retrieve a management summary of the findings in the fall of this year.

Upload