Human mobility data from the BBC Pandemic project

Abstract We present human mobility data for the United Kingdom collected from the “BBC Pandemic”, a public science project linked to the BBC Four television documentary of the same name. Mobile phone GPS trajectories submitted by users and collected over a 24 hour period were aggregated to construct anonymised origin-destination flux matrices at the local administrative district (LAD). We use these data to explore how mobility patterns change with age and employment status - unique stratifications that are not available from other publicly and privately held mobility data sets. We validate the consistency of the aggregated BBC mobility data set against census workflow data and illustrate how the systematic differences in mobility rates with age affect the risk and pattern of transmission between regions with 18-30 year old’s contributing the greatest risk of transmission to adjacent regions, but older 60-100 years playing the most important role in more remote low-density locations.