Analysis of location information gathered through residents’ smartphones toward visualization of communication in local community

Abstract

This research aims to achieve the resident-centered community design by utilizing information and communication technology (ICT), and to create a trigger to regain rich relationship within a community by visualizing media spots which is defined as places where residents communicate much more than the other areas. In order to improve the media spot estimation method proposed by the previous research, we extracted and analyzed location information under various conditions. As a result, we could confirm that a portion of the highest density of location information corresponds to a resident’s home place, and found that a home place can be accurately derived irrespective of the scattering in accuracy. Also, the analysis on how the distribution of location information varies depending on time zone suggests that it is necessary to use location information which is minutely divided in time or aggregated every day of the week.