Using Smartphones to Profile Mobility Patterns in a Living Lab for the Transition to E-mobility

The diffusion of electric vehicles is currently the most promising opportunity to reduce the dependency on fossil fuel in the mobility sector. However, the adoption of the electric vehicles seems to be still hindered by psychological and behavioural barriers. Thus, in order to understand and to foster the transition towards more sustainable mobility styles, it becomes essential to adopt an inter-disciplinary approach. In this framework, the e-mobiliTI project was launched in late 2012 in Southern Switzerland. It aims at understanding the potential for transition in the mobility system at the local level, with a special focus on electric mobility. The project builds upon a small living lab made up of around twenty families, who will be monitored in all their trips through smart mobile devices, in order to get quantitative data, and through focus groups, in order to get qualitative data and perceptions. Here we discuss the major challenge in the initial stage of the e-mobiliTI project, that is the gathering of reliable and high-quality data on users' behaviour. We describe the automatic tracking system, and the data processing and the qualitative assessment approach and comment on the overall performances of the living lab experiment.