ADHI GPS

Acquiring global positioning system (GPS) data can help researchers understand the relationship between participants' location/activity and their health, but existing GPS data collection modes suffer from issues with precision, consistency, and acceptability. Some limitations of current GPS mobile apps are satellite service disruption, power saving mode interference, the miscalibration of the device’s compass, and user error during data collection, which result in missing or inaccurate data. I present a novel multilingual GPS mobile app and live administrative dashboard to address these limitations. The app performs triangulation between GPS satellite data, the nearest cellular tower, and WiFi router location data which are processed through a unique GPS algorithm with a mean error of only 1.5 meters. Since GPS data results in coordinates commonly reverse geo-coded to place-based datasets, accuracy is critical in determining place type or other characteristics.

The app is additionally designed with redundancy and fault tolerance in mind to run continuously in the background of a user’s smartphone, so there is no data loss from accidentally closing the application or restarting the phone.

Moreover, the ADHI GPS app has a flexible sampling rate ranging from 1 second to 20 minutes. Sampling frequency flexibility can adjust the battery life and reduce the need to charge as frequently. Last, application programming interface (API) integrations allow for the live data stream, which can improve monitoring and troubleshooting in the field.

To learn more about the author, please visit:
https://dineshmendhe.com
https://ifh.rutgers.edu/faculty_staff/dinesh-mendhe/