I have to confirm my home location almost everyday. For example the gps location will change a little bit at home. I understand that, but Arc Timeline means I used the car. I don’t know why. So I have to change almost everytime to stay.
Is there a possibility to set stay for a larger area at home, so I don’t have to confirm also everyday that. I mean for location I’ve been almost everyday like home or work, that would be much easier.
I use Arc Timeline now more than one month. Here a picture of what I mean.
Hi! Do you mean that sometimes the location data drifts while you’re at home, and you have to change its type to “stationary”?
Or do you mean that you have to confirm the Home place assignment for Home visits, meaning that Arc isn’t confident in its choice?
The sizes of places in Arc’s database are based on the range of location data within those visits. So the sizes essentially represent the size of the buildings themselves (or at least the parts of the buildings that you regularly are in). So that part is automatic - large buildings will have large radiuses, and small buildings will have small radiuses.
If the problem is that you’re getting drifting location data while at home, which is fooling Arc into recording short trip items throughout the day, then for that make sure you’re changing those items to “stationary”, not “bogus”. If you change them to “stationary” then Arc’s “Trust Factor” system will learn that location data in that area often drifts, and will adjust its recording to account for that, reducing the drift over time.
If however you mark those items as “bogus”, the data will be treated as though it’s been deleted, and won’t contribute to the Trust Factor calculations, which will prevent Arc from adapting to the problem. “Bogus” should only be used for data that is very far from the real location (eg more than 100 metres or so).
Thank you for your answer. I mean the first one, you can see at my print-screen. I’m at home and the data drift while I’m at home and Arc means I’m driving car :-). But I’m at home. And this Problem I have almost everyday. So I have to Change the type Car to “Stay”. And I have to this so many times. Most of the time it happens when I’m sleeping in the bed and In the morning I check your app, I can see car.
Is the only way to do it, that I have to Change this entry almost everyday from car to stay? Since I used the app, I made this. I have never deleted something since I use your app. Is that the only way?
Hmm. If it’s the drifting location problem, then yeah the correct way to deal with it is to mark that item as “stationary”, so that it will be merged into the visit. It should then stop happening, because that trains the “Trust Factors”, teaching the recording engine to put less trust in what the phone says about data accuracy in that area.
If it’s continuing to be a problem over a long period of time, then something isn’t working right. Well, the phone is producing bad data, which is the first thing that isn’t working right! But from there Arc’s Trust Factor system should be adjusting for that and making the problem go away. So if that isn’t happening, then that’s the second thing not working right.
Unfortunately I don’t have any useful advice in this case. Trust Factor tends to work very well, even after only a few days of corrections. So the fact that the problem is still happening after a longer period of time… that’s unusual.
The usual things I would suggest, that I suspect won’t be much use in this case, are:
Make sure your phone has wifi turned on. It doesn’t have to be connected, just turned on. iPhones use wifi hotspot triangulation to improve location data accuracy when indoors.
Actually… that’s all I’ve got. None of the other usual advice really fits in this case. The problem really should just go away on its own!
How many days has it been happening so far, do you think?
Location data and Airplane/Flight Mode can’t really work together, especially indoors.
GPS requires “line of sight”, which means the phone needs to be able to “see” the satellites in the sky, either outdoors or with wide angle of view out a nearby window.
If the phone can’t see enough satellites, it will attempt to use wifi hotspot triangulation to get an approximate location instead. In built up city areas that can work reasonably well, due to there being many wifi hotspots in cities. But in suburban or rural areas it’s less reliable. And when wifi is turned off completely it’s impossible.
The final fallback iPhones use for location data is cell tower triangulation. That works similarly to wifi hotspot triangulation, but with much less accuracy. Wifi hotspot triangulation can get a location to within around 60 metres at best, while cell tower triangulation achieves around 1000 metres accuracy at best.
Airplane/Flight Mode disables all of those options except GPS. So if the phone can’t see enough satellites out a nearby window it can’t determine a location at all. Or if it can see a small number of satellites, but in only one area of the sky, it will calculate a location that’s potentially significantly offset or drifting or both.
What you’re experiencing is likely that - the phone relying on GPS alone, and not being able to see a broad enough area of the sky, so the result is drifting and offset location data.
When indoors, you really do need wifi (and cellular connection) enabled! Otherwise location data isn’t going to work well or at all.
