Itinerum: The open smartphone travel survey platform

Abstract

With the advent of smartphones and their ability to know their own location, there is an enormous potential to collect location data for many purposes, including travel-related research. While the ability to create smartphone travel survey applications is potentially revolutionary, the development of such applications remains sufficiently difficult to be beyond a typical transportation researcher’s ability. Of course, development of an app is only the first challenge associated with using such tools; information also needs to be inferred from collected data. The Itinerum platform was created to overcome the barriers facing the use of smartphones for transportation research. The Itinerum platform is a smartphone travel survey platform that allows researchers to customize the Itinerum app with their own questions and prompts, distribute these surveys, monitor, visualize and increasingly process collected data without a background in programming. With the platform, a customized study can be created in 10 min. Keywords: Smartphones, Travel surveys, Web platform