Archives for March 2016

Anyone autonomously moving in geospace is a pedestrian. This term denotes a large but heterogenous collective unified by similar strategies and speed of movement. Pedestrian navigation typically is an outdoor activity in public space.

It is a banality that pedestrians do not move and navigate like motor vehicles. Yet to date, geospatial data and navigation systems to assist pedestrian orientation and movement are mainly based on car navigation data. Media to support movement and navigation of pedestrians effectively, however, require geospatial data tailored to the specific albeit diverse requirements of the targeted audience.

In a feasibility study, a team of geoinformation and social scientists of Potsdam and Saarbruecken have assessed the status quo of existing data for pedestrian navigation and developed strategies to create and maintain a geospatial data base for pedestrians.

Hartmut Asche is a professor of geoinformation science at Potsdam university. His research foci include data acquisition, management and services for orientation and navigation in geospatial environments.

MindTags makes digital accessibility in everyday life tangible and opens up new experiences for everyone. Using a smartphone, our system makes it possible to access information, adapted for user-specific needs.

MindTags is designed according to the principles of universal design and is optimized to be used by people with disabilities.

Cultural and educational institutions, public buildings as well as businesses can provide current and location-based information to their visitors and staff using MindTags. We also offer orientation in open and closed spaces and make them accessible to everyone.

Understanding how people move is key to optimizing transport services. While the mobility market is facing huge dynamics, little has changed in the methods to measure performance and usage of individual services. Current transport analytics are still conducted with phone interviews and online forms.

MotionTag instead uses smartphone sensor data and machine learning to determine how, when and where people travel. Furthermore we use that data to paint a holistic picture of people’s mobility. Our talk will discuss different steps and problems concerning the process from recording smartphone sensor data to putting identified trips on a map. Therefore we compare our approach to related work in this field of study and present an extract.

Your presenter: Florian Stock, MotionTag

MotionTag creates services from motion data. Our app automatically detects 9 different transport means and gives new insights into people’s mobility behavior. Our vision is to enable seamless travelling with Be-In/Be-Out ticketing. We dream of a world where people access public transport without having to deal with tariff zones, ticket machines or change. A person just enters a subway, a train or even a carsharing vehicle and travels from A to B while the smartphone takes care of the billing.

Florian studied Mathematics at the TU Berlin and the CSIRO in Melbourne, Australia.
Since November 2015 he is a co-founder and the CTO of MotionTag.