Understanding how people behave, move, participate and respond to services is essential for sustainable public decision-making. Reliable behavioural and citizen data helps organisations design better policies, evaluate interventions, set realistic climate targets and understand how change affects everyday life.
The Traditional Approach: Surveys and Diaries
For decades, the gold standard for mobility data collection was the household travel survey (HTS). Families would be recruited and asked to record every trip they made in a paper diary over one or two days — where they went, how long it took, which mode they used.
The results were rich in detail but came with significant problems:
- High cost — recruiting, printing, distributing, and processing paper diaries is labour-intensive
- Respondent burden — participants frequently underreport short trips and walking stages
- Short capture window — single-day diaries miss weekly travel patterns (e.g. different commute days, leisure trips on weekends)
- Long lead times — from survey design to usable datasets typically takes 12–18 months
The GPS Revolution
The arrival of GPS-enabled devices changed what was possible. Passive GPS logging eliminated the need for respondents to manually record trips — instead, movement was captured automatically and processed afterward to infer transport modes and activity stops.
Early GPS-based surveys used dedicated logger devices given to participants. While more accurate than paper diaries, they were still expensive to operate at scale, required device retrieval and charging, and were limited to short deployments.
Mobile Behavioural Data Platforms
Smartphone apps represent the current frontier. Nearly everyone already carries a GPS-enabled device, eliminating the need for dedicated hardware. A well-designed travel survey app can:
- Passively collect GPS, accelerometer, Wi-Fi, and cell signal data in the background
- Use machine learning algorithms to automatically detect trips, classify transport modes, and identify activity stops
- Capture multiple weeks of data per participant, revealing weekly and seasonal travel patterns
- Deliver prompted recall surveys at the right moment — after a trip or at end of day
- Keep respondents engaged through personalised statistics (CO₂ footprint, distance per mode, progress toward survey goals)
This is the approach behind MobyApp, MobyX’s mobile behavioural data platform. It can combine location, motion and survey data, processed through analytical workflows, to generate activity and context-rich datasets — reducing participant burden while improving the quality of evidence available to researchers and decision-makers.
What MobyApp Supports
MobyApp has been used in surveys across Europe by public authorities and research organisations:
- Municipality of Turin, Italy — multi-day travel data collection for urban planning
- Oxfordshire County Council, UK — travel behaviour monitoring and SUMP support
- Bologna, Italy — citizen engagement and travel diary collection under the SPINE EU project
The platform is built following privacy-by-design principles and produces GDPR-compliant datasets ready for behavioural research, policy evaluation, sustainability planning and modelling workflows.
Integrating Questionnaire Surveys with Passive Tracking
Passive GPS tracking tells you what people did — but not always why. MobyApp addresses this by integrating with LimeSurvey™ to allow survey managers to deliver custom questionnaires to participants at any point in the data collection process: before the survey begins (for demographics), after individual trips (for trip purpose), or at survey end (for attitudes and stated preferences).
This combination of passive objective data and active subjective data produces richer, more usable datasets for transport modelling.
Choosing the Right Approach
The best data collection method depends on your goals:
- For behavioural and sustainability studies: mobile, multi-day data collection provides a richer longitudinal view of activities, movement and change over time.
- For citizen engagement and feedback: a white-label platform such as CitizenApp allows municipalities and organisations to create trusted, branded participation channels.
- For research and academic studies: the MobyApp Trial tier allows smaller-scale studies and proof-of-concept deployments
Want to explore which data and engagement approach fits your project? Contact the MobyX team — we work with public authorities, research institutions, innovation consortia and organisations across Europe.