Exploring Post COVID-19 Outbreak Intradaily Mobility Pattern Change in College Students: a GPS-focused Smartphone Sensing Study
This research addresses behavioral changes in college students during the pandemic, providing insights for mental health and campus planning, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study investigated how college students' daily mobility patterns changed after the COVID-19 outbreak by analyzing GPS data from smartphone sensing, finding that post-outbreak students showed more midday movement, less daily variability, and a weaker link between mobility and negative mood compared to pre-outbreak students.
With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, most colleges and universities move to restrict campus activities, reduce indoor gatherings and move instruction online. These changes required that students adapt and alter their daily routines accordingly. To investigate patterns associated with these behavioral changes, we collected smartphone sensing data using the Beiwe platform from two groups of undergraduate students at a major North American university, one from January to March of 2020 (74 participants), the other from May to August (52 participants), to observe the differences in students' daily life patterns before and after the start of the pandemic. In this paper, we focus on the mobility patterns evidenced by GPS signal tracking from the students' smartphones and report findings using several analytical methods including principal component analysis, circadian rhythm analysis, and predictive modeling of perceived sadness levels using mobility-based digital metrics. Our findings suggest that compared to the pre-COVID group, students in the mid-COVID group generally (1) registered a greater amount of midday movement than movement in the morning (8-10am) and in the evening (7-9pm), as opposed to the other way around; (2) exhibited significantly less intradaily variability in their daily movement, and (3) had a significant lower correlation between their mobility patterns and negative mood.