Inferring Destinations and Activity Types of Older Adults From GPS Data: Algorithm Development and Validation

Background: Outdoor mobility is an important aspect of older adults' functional status. GPS has been used to create indicators reflecting the spatiotemporal dimensions of outdoor mobility for applications in health and aging. However, outdoor mobility is a multidimensional construct. There is, as of yet, no classification algorithm that groups and characterizes older adults' outdoor mobility based on its semantic aspects (ie, mobility intentions and motivations) by integrating geographic and domain knowledge. Objective: This study assesses the feasibility of using GPS to determine semantic dimensions of older adults' outdoor mobility, including destinations and activity types. Methods: A total of 5 healthy individuals, aged 65 years or older, carried a GPS device when traveling outside their homes for 4 weeks. The participants were also given a travel diary to record details of all excursions from their homes, including date, time, and destination information. We first designed and implemented an algorithm to extract destinations and infer activity types (eg, food, shopping, and sport) from the GPS data. We then evaluated the performance of the GPS-derived destination and activity information against the traditional diary method. Results: Our results detected the stop locations of older adults from their GPS data with an F1 score of 87%. On average, the extracted home locations were within a 40.18-meter (SD 1.18) distance of the actual home locations. For the activity-inference algorithm, our results reached an F1 score of 86% for all participants, suggesting a reasonable accuracy against the travel diary recordings. Our results also suggest that the activity inference's accuracy measure differed by neighborhood characteristics (ie, Walk Score). Conclusions: We conclude that GPS technology is accurate for determining semantic dimensions of outdoor mobility. However, further improvements may be needed to develop a robust application of this system that can be adopted in clinical practice.