Transportation and urban planners use the data collected in these surveys to perform analysis and develop models of household travel and activity patterns. They use this information to make decisions that will improve the transportation network in your area and the options available to you.
If you are traveling outside of your local area during the survey, please continue to participate in the survey by keeping the smartphone app running and carrying your smartphone or logger with you, and by continuing to verify the data in your Activity Diary. If you are flying, you should of course comply with any airline regulations by putting your phone on Airplane Mode while enroute. Once you turn off Airplane Mode, the app will resume collecting data.
To participate in the survey, you will be collecting data through a mobile device - either via your smartphone on which you will have installed the Mobile Market Monitor app, or via a GPS logger that would have been distributed to you. These mobile devices provide data, such as GPS, GSM, Wi-Fi and accelerometer that are periodically uploaded to our secure server, processed, and made available online for you to view and verify in the Activity Diary on our website.
Your privacy is of the utmost importance. Although you may be participating in the survey as part of a household with other members, we require that you establish your own username and password to access your Activity Diary on our website in order to protect your privacy. We transmit your data using a secure data transfer process and keep it on a secure server. For more information, please see our Privacy Policy here.
The Mobile Market Monitor app can be found in the App store for iPhones and the Google Play store for Androids. Use the following links to find the app:
In order to log in to the app, you must have first registered an account by selecting a username and password on the website associated with the survey in which you are participating. Use this same username and password to log in to the smartphone app. Once you begin collecting data, you will be able to view it in the Activity Diary on the website.
The application is used to conduct household travel surveys by collecting data that transportation and urban planners use to make decisions about transportation options in your region. The app uses sensors in your phone to collect GPS, GSM, Wi-Fi and accelerometer information from your mobile device. These data are transmitted over a secure connection to our backend server. We process the data and make inferences about what your travel and activity pattern looked like for a given day. We present this processed data back to you in the Activity Diary of the travel survey website in the form of a map and a timeline.
Applications that use GPS tend to drain the battery faster than usual. We have worked to minimize the battery usage as much as possible. However, it is likely that use of this app will drain the battery faster than the rate to which you are accustomed.
If you typically use your phone a lot, you may need to charge your battery more than once per day (and may want to therefore carry a charger with you during your data collection days). Otherwise, be sure to charge the battery at night or whenever you can.
To see or manage the battery level settings within the app, go to Settings and then to Battery Limit, where you can choose to have the app turn off automatically if it reaches a level of 10%, 20% or 30%. If this happens, please be sure to recharge your battery as soon as possible in order to be able to continue participating in the survey.
No, each participating household member must create his or her own account with a unique username and password. This not only is required from a technology standpoint, but also protects each participant’s privacy.
You may run the application on more than one device; however, you should onlybe signed in to your account on one device at a time. If the application is tracking location data from more than one device at the same time, the location traces will be incorrect. Unless you encounter a problem with your smartphone during the survey period and have to switch to a different phone, we ask that you use the same mobile device for the entire survey period.
The app should ideally be run at all times for maximum data collection and to minimize the possibility of any data gaps. However, should you wish or need to discontinue the use of the application at some point during your survey period, you may log out of the app using the 'Logout' option under the Settings menu. Please make sure that you log back into the app as soon as you can comfortably resume data collection.
No, you do not need to have a data plan to run the app. The data plan is only used, if at all, to transmit the collected data to our server. However, this data transmission can be done via Wi-Fi instead. Within the app, go to Settings and then Sync, where you may set the app to transmit your collected data using one of 3 preferences:
- Wi-Fi and Mobile Data Plan
- Wi-Fi
- Mobile Data Plan
If you do not have a data plan or prefer to only transmit data via Wi-Fi, set the Sync option to Wi-Fi.
While the amount of data uploaded will vary depending on your phone model and travel patterns, on average, the daily data usage is very small ranging from 3.5-6 MB (megabytes). This represents less than 1% of either a monthly data plan of either 1G (gigabyte) or 2G.
You may be automatically signed out of the app if your battery level becomes too low. We respect your battery needs, and allow you to choose a battery below which the app will stop collecting data and sign you out. If this happens, please sign back in to the app as soon as you are able to charge your battery. (To see or manage the battery level settings within the app, go to Settings and then to Battery Limit, where you can choose to have the app turn off automatically if it reaches a level of 10%, 20% or 30%.)
We provide people who don’t have a smartphone with a GPS logger for the time period of the survey. The logger collects similar information as the smartphone app, so that we can track location and you can participate in the survey.
You need to carry the logger with wherever you go for the duration of the survey by carrying it in a pocket, purse, or a bag. Each night, you must charge the logger using the charger cable provided to you.
The Activity Diary provides a representation of your travel and activities throughout a given day through a map and a daily timeline. Since the data collected by the mobile devices are not perfect, we make inferences through our algorithms as best we can about when you were traveling and when you stopped in a particular location for a period of time. In some cases, we also infer what mode of traveling you were using and what general activity category was involved with a particular stop.
We need for you to review and verify or amend this data so that we have a more accurate portrayal of your day’s travel and activity. In addition, you will be asked to provide some detail for each travel or activity segment, such as where you parked if traveling by car, or how many people were in your traveling party.
Your activity location may be slightly off due to the aggregation of data points. If the location is significantly off from where your actual location was, you may move the icon by clicking on it with your mouse and dragging it to the proper location.
Our app uses GPS, GSM, Wi-Fi, and accelerometer data. Sometimes, when GPS data isn’t available, we will collect location data from the nearest cell towers, which give us less accurate locations. This data collection will result in ‘spiky’ traces, or straight lines between activities. These traces are not meant to reflect your exact trips or routes, and our technology does not enable you to revise them.
Sometimes, even when you have been at home for a period of time, your smartphone will pick up signals from nearby cell towers, which makes it appear as though you left home. If you did not actually travel during the period shown, you should delete the trip by clicking the X for that travel segment.
On the other hand, you may have traveled during that time period but made a very short stop (for example, to drop someone off at school or work). In this case, you should add this stop to your timeline by clicking on the Add Stop button.
Sometimes, these short stops may have occurred when you were stopped at a traffic light or were sitting in traffic or if you were on a public transit vehicle that stopped in various places along the way. These short stops may also appear during a walk trip. If these are not “real” stops that you deliberately made for a specific activity, you should delete them from your timeline by clicking the X for the that segment.
Sometimes, you will use more than one form of transportation to travel between activities (for example, walking to a bus stop and then taking the bus, or driving to a light rail station, parking and taking the light rail). The 'change mode' activity reflects that point of change when you may have been stationary while waiting for the next mode of transportation or parking your car. Transportation planners are very interested in knowing about these change mode activities since they represent an important aspect of your travel experiences and the transportation network.
You may select multiple activities for a given stop or location. If you do so, you will asked to identify the activity that you consider to be the primary or main activity purpose for that location. While it is not always easy to determine this, please answer as best you can.
Sometimes, your travel may be for the purpose of transporting other people to their activities. For example, if you dropped a child off at school, the activity during the drop-off period on your timeline should reflect 'Drop-off/Pickup/Accompany Someone'. If you transported someone and then also accompanied that person to their activity (for example, taking someone to a medical appointment), you would also choose 'Drop-off/Pickup/Accompany Someone' as the activity on your timeline (rather than, for example, 'Medical/Dental').
Since drop-offs and pickups of passengers are sometimes very short, they often do not get picked up as a stop on the Activity Diary. If you are aware of a missing drop-off or pick-up, please use the Add Stop button to add it to your timeline.
