How Mobility and Sociality Reshape the Context: A Decade of Experience in Mobile CrowdSensing

Abstract

The possibility of understanding the dynamics of human mobility and sociality creates the opportunity to re-design the way data are collected by exploiting the crowd. We survey the last decade of experimentation and research in the field of mobile CrowdSensing, a paradigm centred on users’ devices as the primary source for collecting data from urban areas. To this purpose, we report the methodologies aimed at building information about users’ mobility and sociality in the form of ties among users and communities of users. We present two methodologies to identify communities: spatial and co-location-based. We also discuss some perspectives about the future of mobile CrowdSensing and its impact on four investigation areas: contact tracing, edge-based MCS architectures, digitalization in Industry 5.0 and community detection algorithms.