Measuring your own movement – all in the name of research

Whether it means walking to the tram stop every morning, taking a lunchtime stroll or perhaps enjoying some sporting fun in the evening, many of us are well aware that we should exercise more. Yet in terms of physical activity, how do we actually compare with other people in the canton where we live, in Switzerland as a whole or in our workplace? An app developed by the ETH spin-off Antavi is designed to measure just that – and to make the data it collects available to ETH Zurich for research purposes.

Antavi was established by Ulf Blanke and Sebastian Feese from the Wearable Computing Laboratory, part of the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET), with funding from the Pioneer Fellowship programme. Back in 2013, they developed a Züri Fäscht app to measure streams of movement at major events like Zurich’s famous carnival. It was downloaded 70,000 times.

Antavi’s current project is based on a campaign run by the Swiss radio and television broadcaster SRF. Under the slogan “SRF bewegt” (“SRF gets moving”), radio stations SRF 1 and SRF 3 have joined forces with the Federal Office of Public Health, the Federal Office of Sport and the Federal Office of Energy to inject some movement into people’s inactive everyday lives. As of today, 11 May, Antavi’s app is available for Android and iOS devices. SRF is due to hold a special campaign week from 8 to 12 June.

Live comparisons with other users

“The app records users’ daily movements. The key criterion here is the distance covered,” says Ulf Blanke from Antavi. Using step recognition and GPS localisation or a bike mode, the app collects data on how far each user moves in his or her everyday life.

The benefit of this movement app over others is that the data is transmitted live, which enables users to compare their own movements with other people’s at any given time. At a glance, they can see whether their current activity is above or below the average level in the canton in which they live or even across the whole of Switzerland. There are also nationwide rankings of users, cantons and even specific groups, and users can share their personal results via social media.

According to Blanke, enabling the performance data for all users to be displayed in real time has been one of the major challenges of this project. “We also needed an energy-efficient movement detection system that could run on devices 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he adds. Fortunately, at D-ITET’s Wearable Computing Lab, the developers had access to expertise in sensors, signal processing and IT, which enabled them, for instance, to process and collect large data volumes.  

Research based on the data collected

ETH Zurich also benefits from the data collected by the app. Plans are already in place for a computer science student to use it for his Bachelor’s dissertation, for example. The data could be used to investigate a variety of research hypotheses on topics such as mobility, health or everyday behavioural patterns. “Researchers usually lack the channels they need to obtain data from a large number of users,” says Blanke. “Antavi is making a whole body of data accessible to scientific research, the likes of which would otherwise only be available to large companies such as Google or Facebook.” The data is processed anonymously, so individual users cannot later be identified as the source.