Mobile phone monitoring to tackle Covid-19

A new online tool uses mobile phone data to help tackle Covid-19 by monitoring population movement

A new online tool from Oxford researchers uses mobile phone data to help tackle Covid-19 by monitoring population movement.

The data can reveal everything from how often people are going out and how far they are travelling – to when the queries time to visit a supermarket is.

The data is all anonymised, so no individual person is tracked by their phone data.

Instead the new online tool developed by a team of AI and big data researchers at the University of Oxford looks at overall patterns generated by mobile phone data signals.

The data shows visits to public parks in the UK has dropped 32 per cent and visits to hospital have dropped 80 per cent.

The Oxford Covid-19 Impact Monitor has already revealed how life in the UK has changed since the Coronavirus outbreak.

To allay privacy concerns the Oxford Covid-19 Impact Monitor only uses anonymised and aggregated mobile phone location data. This GDPR-compliant data is then used to power interactive digital dashboards that can help policymakers, clinicians and the general public to understand better the impact of Covid-19 on the NHS and the wider community.

The online dashboards are free and publicly available, together with key insights from the data. Analyses can be carried out at different degrees of geographic detail, including at the local and regional levels, and also for specific NHS hospital catchment areas.

Commenting on the launch of the new tool, Dr Adam Saunders said: The monitoring of population movements in response to the Covid-19 pandemic has received considerable attention following its use in China, South Korea and Singapore, the countries where the virus impacted earliest. The team came together to do what we could to help tackle the challenge facing the UK through the use of ethical big data analytics for the public good.

Dr Matthias Qian said: Getting insights from big data is key if the UK is effectively to fight coronavirus, whilst at the same time making costly measures such as social distancing work as efficiently as possible. Fully anonymised and aggregated mobile phone location data provides a responsible approach for revealing important insights for the NHS, the government and the wider public, which can help save lives.

The new tool was developed by a team from across the University of Oxford led by Dr Adam Saunders (SKOPE, Department of Education) and Dr Matthias Qian (Department of Economics). Team members include Daniel Pesch (Saïd Business School), Dr Steven Reece (Department of Engineering Science), Dr Won Do Lee (Transport Studies Unit, School of Geography and the Environment), Professor Renaud Lambiotte (Mathematical Institute) and Lucas Kruitwagen (School of Geography and the Environment).