NREL OpenPATH 4+

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

    • 2.6 • 10 Ratings
    • Free

iPhone Screenshots

Description

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Open Platform for Agile Trip Heuristics (NREL OpenPATH) enables people to track their travel modes—car, bus, bike, walking, etc.—and measure their associated energy use and carbon footprint.

The app empowers communities to understand their travel mode choices and patterns, experiment with options to make them more sustainable, and evaluate the results. Such results can inform effective transportation policy and planning and be used to build more sustainable and accessible cities.

NREL OpenPATH informs individual users about the impact of their choices, and also makes aggregated, community-level data on mode shares, trip frequencies, and carbon footprints available via a public dashboard.

NREL OpenPATH incorporates continuous data collection and analysis via a smart phone app backed by a server and automated data processing. Its open nature enables transparent data collection and analysis, while allowing it to be configured for individual programs or studies.

On first install, the app does not collect or transmit data. Once you click the link or scan the QR code to join a given study or program, you will be asked to consent to data collection and storage before the app begins functioning. If you are not part of a partner community or program but are simply interested in quantifying your individual carbon footprint, you can join the NREL-run open-access study. In the aggregate, your data might be used as the control for experiments run by our partners.

At its core, the app represents an automatically sensed travel diary, constructed from background sensed location and accelerometer data. You can annotate the diary with semantic labels as requested by a given program administrator or researcher.

Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life. Therefore, the app automatically turns off the GPS if you are not moving. This significantly reduces the battery drain caused by location tracking. The app results in ~ 5% battery drain for up to 3 hours of travel per day.

What’s New

Version 2.0.0

- Support multiple modes of interest
- Turn off BLE scanning for non-fleet deployments

Ratings and Reviews

2.6 out of 5
10 Ratings

10 Ratings

AnonymousReviewer43627 ,

Epic fail

I am required to use this as part of an e-bike voucher program. The app fails in a fundamental way: it does not recognize multi-purpose trips. All trip types are radio buttons, not checkboxes—something that could be very easily fixed. If you, say, walk to the farmer’s market, the trip cannot be for exercise, shopping, and socializing all at the same time. This represents a complete misunderstanding of how people travel. This aside, the trip recognition function is really quite bad. I went to a festival recently and walked quite a bit. Each festival walking segment was classified as a separate trip, so I had to label like 10 different trips! The auto-classification is also garbage, labeling some walking trips as e-bike. Like, I couldn’t e-bike that slow if I tried! For an app developed by so-called experts, this all is quite befuddling, as they could design this in a way that helps them collect valuable/useful data, but they choose not to.

NutmegUS ,

Annoying notifications and draining battery

Doesn’t provide any good information. Just tracks your location. Delete delete delete.

App Privacy

The developer, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.

Data Linked to You

The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:

  • Health & Fitness
  • Location
  • Usage Data
  • Sensitive Info

Data Not Linked to You

The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:

  • Diagnostics

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

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