Research project: Sixth Sense Transport

The project is being led by the University of Southampton (Tom Cherrett, Transportation Research Group) and involves a collaboration between the University of Lancaster (Nigel Davies, School of Computing and Communications), Bournemouth University (Janet Dickinson, International Centre for Tourism and Hospitality Research), University of Salford (Sarah Norgate, College of Health and Social Care) and University of Edinburgh (Chris Speed, Architecture and Landscape Architecture).
Our research vision is to understand the extent to which behavioural change in transport habits and practices can be facilitated through the creation of a new form of ‘transport network’, based on extending social networking principles to transport users and their individual vehicles using smartphones.

This is being explored across four domains:
1) Education (University of Salford)
Can smartphones be used to give parents greater visibility of journey-to-school options through intelligent ‘walking school buses’ (WSBs)?

2) Tourism (Bournemouth University)
In a tourism setting, can campers use smartphone technology to get a greater understanding of tourist movements to events and attractions, and an improved sense of community with a view to increasing lift sharing and collaborative shopping?

3) Logistics (University of Southampton)
Focussing on a case study with Oxfam, can smartphones be used by communities of shop managers, area managers and drivers to better visualise and anticipate transport movements and create better community engagement to benefit the business?

Find out more at www.sixthsensetransport.com