Dominik Bucher has successfully defended his doctoral thesis titled “Spatio-Temporal Information and Communication Technologies Supporting Sustainable Personal Mobility” on 21 September 2020.
His research revolved around the question of how smartphone-tracked individual mobility data can be analyzed and utilized to support people in transitioning towards sustainable mobility usage. To this purpose, analysis methods (that identify transport modes, extract preferences and context, and detect changes in behavior), routing algorithms (that put an emphasis on personalized inter-modal transport involving a large number of transport options) and communication strategies (based on research on motivation and persuasion and evaluated using the large-scale mobility study GoEco!) were presented. Overall, if individual mobility data is used to give people eco-feedback and alternative route options in a timely manner, it is successful in helping people think about and adopt more sustainable mobility styles.