TrafficSense

TrafficSense is a research project at Aalto University. TrafficSense encourages travellers towards more energy-efficient mobility by learning regular door‐to‐door routes and giving proactive assistance.

This application collects data about your mobility (where and how you move) for algorithm development. In return:

1) After learning your public transportation usage, TrafficSense notifies you of public transportation disruptions on the lines and times you use (available for Helsinki Regional Transport).

2) After learning where you drive, TrafficSense notifies you of traffic disorders at the locations and during the times you move (available in Finland).

3) Display of your most likely next destinations from your current location and jump to Google Maps navigation.

4) Viewing of past routes and travel modes. Editing or confirmation of automatically detected travel modes.

5) Display and sharing of a personal energy certificate, which shows your average CO2 emission per km and ranking among users of the application.

6) View the current traffic situation.

Public transport recognition currently only works in the greater Helsinki area. Public transport recognition is based on time and location, so please do check that your phone is in correct time.

The following permissions are needed:

1) "Precise location (GPS and network-based) and activity recognition" to record mobility and current activity.

2) "Full network access, view network connections" to upload the data to our research server. The background data usage is fairly low, but we do recommend a flat-rate data subscription and will not pay your bills.

3) "Add, remove, find accounts on the device" to be able to log you in to the service with your Google account. We do not ask or store your Google account or your contacts but only an anonymous unique identifier provided by the Google sign-in functionality. With this anonymous identifier we can show you your data both in the application and the web-service we provide when you sign-in to them with the same Google account.

4) "Run at startup" to be able to restore measuring after the phone has been switched off. The application main menu has a "Service stop" selection. If it is selected, no more data is collected and the application does not start before "Service start" is manually selected from the application.

5) "External media storage" to save the energy certificate for sharing.

Additional battery consumption caused by the application depends on other software accessing the same services like precise location. According to our latest measurements the increase when the phone is still is negligible, and only about 4% during mobility.

We have observed that the power-saving features of especially Huawei devices turn off background services (including TrafficSense) by default. If this happens, please activate the setting from "Settings > Advanced settings > Battery > Protected apps > TrafficSense".

Do note that according to Finnish road and traffic law it is forbidden to use a mobile phone while driving by holding the phone in hands.

Additional information available from the web page of the TrafficSense project.