Measuring Fine Scale Behavior

University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis has done a lot of great work in understanding spatial behavior, and one of their current projects, CAPABLE (Children’s Activities, Perception and Behaviour in the Local Environment) focuses on children’s activities patterns across space and time, looking at things like patterns of travel between home and school and other daily movement. One of the issues the researchers are hoping to understand is the possible relationship between patterns of travel and obesity in children.

There are 3 example animations of children’s GPS tracks, walking a dog, walking home from school, and playing football, which are mapped onto a Google Maps interface and also show the changing levels of activity throughout each track. Geospatial technologies and data have reached a scale where we can look at issues at the true local level, and I think we are only at the beginning of the curve in terms of fine scale analysis.