Assessing Bias in Smartphone Mobility Estimates in Low Income Countries

It has become common for governments and practitioners to measure mobility using data from smartphones, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet in countries where few people have smartphones, or use mobile internet, the movement of smartphones may not be a good indicator of the movement of the...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors:	Milusheva, Sveta, Björkegren, Daniel, Viotti, Leonardo
Format:	Journal Article
Published:	Association for Computing Machinery 2021
Subjects:	SMARTPHONE MOBILITY ESTIMATION CORONAVIRUS COVID-19 PANDEMIC IMPACT LOCKDOWN MOBILE INTERNET
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36611

id	okr-10986-36611
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	okr-10986-366112022-01-28T16:20:33Z Assessing Bias in Smartphone Mobility Estimates in Low Income Countries Milusheva, Sveta Björkegren, Daniel Viotti, Leonardo SMARTPHONE MOBILITY ESTIMATION CORONAVIRUS COVID-19 PANDEMIC IMPACT LOCKDOWN MOBILE INTERNET It has become common for governments and practitioners to measure mobility using data from smartphones, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet in countries where few people have smartphones, or use mobile internet, the movement of smartphones may not be a good indicator of the movement of the population. This paper develops a framework for approaching potential bias that can arise when measuring mobility with smartphones. Using mobile phone operator records in Uganda, we compare the mobility of smartphones and the basic and feature phones that are more common. Smartphones have different travel patterns, and decrease mobility substantially more in response to a COVID-19 lockdown. This suggests caution when interpreting smartphone mobility estimates in contexts with low adoption. 2021-11-19T15:05:59Z 2021-11-19T15:05:59Z 2021-06-28 Journal Article Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36611 CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo World Bank Association for Computing Machinery Publications & Research Publications & Research :: Journal Article Africa Africa Eastern and Southern (AFE) Uganda
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	Digital Repositories
building	World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
collection	World Bank
topic	SMARTPHONE MOBILITY ESTIMATION CORONAVIRUS COVID-19 PANDEMIC IMPACT LOCKDOWN MOBILE INTERNET
spellingShingle	SMARTPHONE MOBILITY ESTIMATION CORONAVIRUS COVID-19 PANDEMIC IMPACT LOCKDOWN MOBILE INTERNET Milusheva, Sveta Björkegren, Daniel Viotti, Leonardo Assessing Bias in Smartphone Mobility Estimates in Low Income Countries
geographic_facet	Africa Africa Eastern and Southern (AFE) Uganda
description	It has become common for governments and practitioners to measure mobility using data from smartphones, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet in countries where few people have smartphones, or use mobile internet, the movement of smartphones may not be a good indicator of the movement of the population. This paper develops a framework for approaching potential bias that can arise when measuring mobility with smartphones. Using mobile phone operator records in Uganda, we compare the mobility of smartphones and the basic and feature phones that are more common. Smartphones have different travel patterns, and decrease mobility substantially more in response to a COVID-19 lockdown. This suggests caution when interpreting smartphone mobility estimates in contexts with low adoption.
format	Journal Article
author	Milusheva, Sveta Björkegren, Daniel Viotti, Leonardo
author_facet	Milusheva, Sveta Björkegren, Daniel Viotti, Leonardo
author_sort	Milusheva, Sveta
title	Assessing Bias in Smartphone Mobility Estimates in Low Income Countries
title_short	Assessing Bias in Smartphone Mobility Estimates in Low Income Countries
title_full	Assessing Bias in Smartphone Mobility Estimates in Low Income Countries
title_fullStr	Assessing Bias in Smartphone Mobility Estimates in Low Income Countries
title_full_unstemmed	Assessing Bias in Smartphone Mobility Estimates in Low Income Countries
title_sort	assessing bias in smartphone mobility estimates in low income countries
publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
publishDate	2021
url	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36611
_version_	1764485606843351040

Assessing Bias in Smartphone Mobility Estimates in Low Income Countries

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