Scientific Publication

Assessing Bias in Smartphone Mobility Estimates in Low Income Countries

author(s) Milusheva, S. - Bjorkegren, D. - Viotti, L.
from UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)
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themes
regions
  • Eastern Africa
  • Sub-Saharan Africa
  • Africa
  • World
citation

Sveta Milusheva, Daniel Bjorkegren, and Leonardo Viotti. 2021. Assessing Bias in Smartphone Mobility Estimates in Low Income Countries. ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 364–378. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3460112.3471968

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Abstract

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. This work is part of the COVID19 Mobility Analytics Task Force project

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