Monitoring People’s Mobility in the Cities: A Review of Advanced Technologies

The knowledge of how people move in urban areas is helpful for the effective deployment of many city services, such as planning and management of transport mobility services, management of security procedures during crowded public events, and design of new public spaces. In the last decade, several technologies have been exploited to collect relevant data to get key insights on the number of people that gather in different points of interest, the amount of time the people spend there, and how frequently people return. This chapter reviews the latest technological solutions that have been developed in this field which exploit the following data sources: radars, lidars, cameras, Wi-Fi sniffers, CDRs, and crowdsourcing applications. It also provides an analysis of the pros and cons of each alternative, the achievable accuracy, and the types of areas that can be monitored.