Smartphone app versus GPS Logger: A comparative study

Abstract This paper describes a study in which a smartphone app and dedicated wearable GPS devices were used in the same study, with processing done with the same software, providing an opportunity to determine the strengths and weaknesses of each. The study found that respondents were more willing to accept the dedicated GPS device, were more likely to comply with the requested task, and provided an overall higher response rate with the GPS logger than with the smartphone app. After processing the data and matching the GPS data to the diary data, both technologies produced similar results in terms of proportion of trips that show a good match to diary data.