A map service of the popularity of exercise routes that was implemented as a research demo won the category Digital products at the International Cartography Conference in Rio de Janeiro in 28.8.2015. A demo of the map service has recently been made available to the public.
The map service offers guidance to people interested in physical exercise. It tells you where, how and when to exercise. It helps you in finding the most popular routes and the most interesting views. With the demo you can find the most popular routes for e.g. walking, running, cycling and mountain biking within an area stretching from the Netherlands all the way to Central Finland.
Behind the map service, there is a lot of research and technology, which is part of the research subjects of the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute (FGI) at the National Land Survey of Finland and Åbo Akademi's (ÅA) mutual research project Supra funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation Tekes. The responsible researchers of the project are Research Manager Juha Oksanen (FGI) and Professor Jan Westerholm (ÅA). The award-winning demo was created by Research Scientist Jani Sainio (ÅA).
Services for users of mobile workout apps
The goal of the research is to develop methods for the production of services for users of mobile workout applications. The starting point was public trajectory data collected with the Sports Tracker application, which illustrate workouts saved by users of the application.
Within the research, we have developed a range of methods for the analysis of the popularity of exercise routes and for routing based on popularity. In the demo of the service, you can study maps illustrating the popularity of various forms of physical activity by using many different parameters, e.g. activity type, workout duration and average speed. Central to the service is that the privacy of the users is fully protected.
Try the demo of the map service
You can try the demo until 31 December 2015 at http://supra.abo.fi/
More information
Research Manager Juha Oksanen, Finnish Geospatial Research Institute (FGI), e-mail firstname.lastname@nls.fi, phone +358 29 531 4861, mobile +358 40 831 4092
International Cartographic Association (ICA)
The International Cartographic Association presents Supra as Map of the Month.