During my six month trip through Southeast Asia, my girlfriend and I tracked our trip using Polarsteps. The app tracks your location and shows your la

Analyzing Polarsteps Data of a Six Month Southeast Asia Trip

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2024-05-10 12:30:06

During my six month trip through Southeast Asia, my girlfriend and I tracked our trip using Polarsteps. The app tracks your location and shows your latest location in a dashboard, which you can share with your family and friends. Besides tracking the location, you can upload ‘steps’, which include pictures/video’s and a description about the location. After we returned, I wanted to create a backup, so I exported the data. Discovering that this export also contained all of the collected coordinates during our trip sparked my curiosity, and led me to analyze the data.

The export process for Polarsteps was quite easy, and the data is provided in the JSON format. The export data contains a file with the data of the user (user.json) and a folder per trip. Each trip has a file with all the GPS points (locations.json) and a file with the information of the trip and all of the steps (trip.json). The uploaded media is stored in a folder per step.

The location data contains only three fields: latitude, longitude and the timestamp. The first thing I noticed during the cleaning of the data: there are a lot of duplicates in the export. The original data contains 10.051 rows. After removing duplicate rows, there were 6.457 rows left. Since our trip lasted exactly 180 days, this averages out to ~36 pings per day.