Dwelling in the canyons: Dwelling detection in urban environments using GPS, Wi-Fi, and geolocation

A fundamental part of studying human mobility is to detect dwelling. When we dwell we are not necessarily stationary, but move around in a confined area. Most of our significant places are indoors, which hampers the detection using GPS. In this work, we discuss three different sensor sources when used for dwelling detection in urban environments: GPS, Wi-Fi and geolocation. Our study is based on data collected on mobile phones in cities of various sizes in four European countries. Based on this data, we compare several methods (i) for classifying whether a user was dwelling and (ii) for determining dwelling locations.