A statistical appraisal on accuracy of smartphone location services: a case study at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Smartphones have become an essential companion in most of the communities. Yet, we may not be quite aware of the capabilities and services that these devices could provide. As a result, features such as location services are underutilized and mostly used for navigation and location sharing. This study explores the limitations of embedded GPS receivers in smartphones with reference to the performance of a consumer-grade hand-held GPS device. The location coordinates obtained with the GPS unit and six smartphones on five locations over ten consecutive days revealed that over 70% of smartphone records provide the location coordinates within 0 to 10 m accuracy. Furthermore, at certain locations, over 75% of records have maintained the coordinate accuracy within 0 to 5 m. Hence, the use of smartphone location information in place of standalone GPS readings, can be recommended for moderate location accuracy requirements, such as geo-tagged data collection. Nevertheless, hand-held GPS units provide better approximations than the smartphones, for elevation readings at the studied locations. Accordingly, further investigations are recommended, to evaluate the discrepancies in elevation records, provided the ambiguities generated while recording the elevation measurements from the hand-held GPS units are minimized.