Mapping Pedestrian Behavior With Wi-Fi

Every time you go online, you leave behind a digital trail. Even if you’re not consciously connecting to the internet, having a smartphone while passing through the many wi-fi networks out there means your daily route can easily be tracked. This detailed look at human mobility, as CityLab’s Laura Bliss previously reported, can give all sorts of valuable information to private companies—sometimes at the expense of consumers’ privacy and security.

But all that readily available data can also be used for the public good, argues Antonin Danalet, a mobility researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. In particular, it can help urban planners design better train stations, hospitals, or even entire cities. “We are surrounded by wi-fi access points, [so] can we use them to know something about pedestrian behavior?,” he says. “It would be cheap and we don't need to install anything.”