A data visualization interactive exploration of human mobility data during the COVID-19 outbreak: a case study

In this paper, we present a real-world study where a community-based tracking infrastructure has been put to good use for understanding human mobility during the COVID-19 outbreak, in order to contrast its diffusion. In particular, the infrastructure, deployed in 81 points of interests (POIs) across the Madeira Islands (Portugal), can collect a massive amount of spatio-temporal data, that can be enriched with potentially independent data sources of additional values (such as the official number of people affected by the coronavirus disease), and crowdsourced data collected by citizens. These enriched hyper-local data can be manipulated to provide i) stakeholders with a visual tool to contrast COVID-19 diffusion through human mobility monitoring, and ii) citizens with an interactive tool to visualize, in real-time, how crowded is a POI and plan their daily activities, and contribute to the data acquisition. Here we present the deployed community-based infrastructure and the data visualization interactive web application, designed to extract meaningful information from human mobility data during the COVID-19 outbreak.