My places diary - Automatic place and transportation- Mode detection

Abstract

My Places Diary is a research prototype, available on Google Play, that tracks places and movements of users throughout the day. It includes two innovative features: Firstly users' home and workplaces are detected automatically, based on heuristics derived from earlier work on automatic semantic place detection. Additional place labels are provided via open geo data sources. The position is determined by using a low power positioning method while preserving sufficient accuracy for place detection. Secondly modes of transportation between places (walking, driving, biking) are derived based on Google's activity recognition module. Combining these two features makes My Places Diary an automatically created diary of places and transitions between them. All computations are executed directly on the mobile phone.