NREL-Lo-Hi

Our research team is interested in exploring ways in which travel patterns of individuals can be collected, analyzed, and used for travel and traffic forecasts. To this end, we would like to collect a snapshot of your travel footprint, along with a few questions regarding your socio-demographic profile.

In return, you get to see a diary of your travel, an estimate of your carbon footprint, and visualize the hotspots for travel in your region.

Does this seem like a lot of work? Not to worry, providing your data is facilitated through an open source instantiation of the e-mission platform ((https://github.com/e-mission/)). The app installation and responding to the survey will not take more than 10 minutes of your time. The information you provide will help advance the state of practice in travel data collection, and travel pattern forecasting. Your data contribution will come back to you as improved travel management and traffic conditions in your city (lesser travel times, lesser congestion, you get the drift!). We would like to assure you that your information will never be made public or sold and will only be used for the research proposed in this project.

Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.

Therefore, we automatically turn the GPS off if you are not moving. This reduces the battery drain caused by location tracking significantly - our tests show that this app results in 10 - 20% additional drain over 24 hours.

If this is still unacceptably high, you can switch to medium accuracy tracking, which should result in ~ 5% additional drain.

For more details on the power/accuracy tradeoff, please see our Technical Report.
https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2016/EECS-2016-119.pdf
or Section 7.2 of the related PhD thesis
https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2019/EECS-2019-180.pdf