Created by UdeC Engineering professors, the user-friendly mo2 platform collects information for research on mobility and transportation, and provides valuable time management advice to users.
By: Verónica Gormaz Muñoz, Journalist – UdeC Faculty of Engineering vgormaz@udec.cl
Images: Faculty of Engineering
Researchers have modeled decisions for transportation and mobility for decades. This is one of the most important aspects for understanding, for example, which transportation people prefer for a given trip. The mo2 platform, created by UdeC Engineering professors Sebastián Astroza, Carlos Navarrete, and Juan Antonio Carrasco, collects these data.
Mo2 calculates the use and value of each user’s time. For Sebastián Astroza, a professor and researcher at the UdeC Department of Industrial Engineering, people consider several factors when deciding which mode of transport to use. However, there are two significant ones: how much money it is going to cost them and how long they are going to take. “We think they will choose cheap and fast transport modes. Let’s look at this through the eyes of utility maximization models. We can take the person’s sensitivity as to how much they care about the travel time and divide it by the sensitivity to the monetary cost of the trip and get what it contributes to the travel time, and divide it by the sensitivity to the monetary cost of the trip,” he explained.
The platform asks the user to remember the previous day and indicate which places they visited, their approximate location, their activities, and for how many minutes. The information is anonymous and used confidentially only for research purposes. As a result, it delivers an approximate time value. In addition, based on their use of time, the person is classified into one of 12 different archetypes, which are illustrated and described in a fun way, hoping that it motivates people to share them on social networks and compare themselves with their loved ones.
The researcher highlights the positive response of users who have shared their opinions and experience with mo2 and who will soon have an updated version. “We are working on a second version of the platform we have already defined with the team. The user has more options, and some questions were changed to make them clearer; the design is simpler, more interactive, easier to use, and easier to understand. The idea is to make it simpler and more user-friendly, and they will be able to enter activities that are not on the list, for example,” he said.
Opening up to the world
Another piece of news regarding the application is that, thanks to the collaboration of professionals and researchers from France and Australia, it is going to be implemented in these countries. “We plan to relaunch the new version in Chile next year. In addition, it has already been translated into French and English to implement it there: users will calculate the value of their time considering the context of each zone. To do this, we recalculated some parameters. We are very interested in comparing countries, which we hope to do with researchers from foreign universities with whom we are already working,” explained Astroza.
How does mo2 work?
Astroza emphasizes that in mo2, the activities are entered through a smart search engine that suggests alternatives as you type. It follows the logic of giving back to the user by providing information immediately and in a fun way, bringing the general public closer to the world of the use and value of time. “Time-use surveys have been around for several decades, but their success lies in having a pollster guide the respondent, which can be very expensive if you are looking for a high sample size. In addition, people do not always report all their activities due to the cumbersome survey format. There are other alternatives to applications, but they require people to pay attention to an application on their phones all day long, which generates exhaustion in the user’s answers (and in the duration of their battery) and alters their time information because using the application is an additional activity. The mo2 platform requires the person to focus for a limited time, and it helps them to report their information because it is based on trips, easy-to-remember milestones, and activities at destinations,” he explained.
The mo2 platform has been developed thanks to the Fondecyt 1221724 (ANID) Project, and its objective is to be used in the future as a substitute for travel and/or activity surveys.
Learn more at https://mo2.cl/
Last modified: 29 de enero de 2025
