For a school project, i have to do an Android project (i am new to Android coding) where i must track the user location and record his travelled distance.
For this, i use the Google Fused Location API.
I am having good results concerning the tracking, but it is only working when the app is in the foreground.
I have to continue to track the user location even when the phone is sleeping, and calculate his travelled distance.
I made some researches and found some solutions with AlarmManager, or with the requestLocationUpdates using PendingIntent. But i can't figure out what is the best to use in my situation.
The "only" thing i want to do while the phone is sleeping is to continue getting his location and increment a float with his distance, so i can update the UI when the user is back on the app screen with his correct distance travelled.
What is the best way to do this in my case ?
Thank for your answers.
Related
after researching the Android Location FusedLocationProviderClient I am very confused about what you should and should not do!
The use case is: The App holds different locations with latitude and longitude. While the user is walking around the app (with the phone in the pocket, screen off) needs to track if he is close to one of the locations and plays a short beep when closer than a defined range.
Would the Geofence option the best solution? These locations will also change during runtime and periodically - they might also be more than 100. Any suggestion?
I am also thinking about a background service to handle all this when the device moves. This would be more flexible and allows for the reload of the locations as well. Any thoughts?
Thanks!!
You don't actually need to build a background service to monitor if a user is close to a location. There is already a geofence provided by Google. It uses fusedlocation provider internally.
Please refer this
You can combine this with a FusedLocationProviderClient and subscribe to location updates. This way you'll get location updates as well.
There may be similar questions regarding this topic,But I need your thoughts and suggestions on some specific requirement.
Here is my need -
We are developing one app which tracks User's trip.
The app will start collecting the location of that user in background,When user 'Starts' his trip from App.Background Service will be fetching locations on the basis of user's movement in specific time duration.
When User 'Stops' his trip from App,We are calculating distance traveled by user with help of all recorded locations(With Google Distance calculating API).
The App works fine in ideal case.
But main challenge is -
In some scenarios,We are not able to fetch exact and precise location of User. Scenarios affecting is - No internet,Data plan with 2g/3g,some specific areas where GPS is not returning accurate data etc.
Incorrect data of lat-long causes incorrect Trip distance and route.Which is main problem with the App.
Please,any one can suggest the best alternative/Suggestion for this?
P.S. - We have tried GPS,Network,FusedLocationProvider.
EDIT 2 --
We have implemented logic on basis of accuracy and distances.Got nearer points. And just came across one useful api from Google that corrects some location points which are distracted from actual Roads. Posting here for reference of others...
Snap to Roads Api from Google
this is a complicated topic.
One consideration you have to take. Android Oreo limits background services and that what you want to achieve won't work.
I would do is this (and it is the recommendation from Google)
When someone starts the trip (the user is aware of it), you must launch a on going notification with a foreground service , don't rely on background services anymore. Check the feature "Start Activity" in Google Fit App.
As for not having signal, or accurate GPS, well... it is a geographical problem!, there is nothing you could do. Or, maybe you can, using the LocationProvider.
FusedLocationProvider is fused within every app that requests locations updates.
Read this out, and see if that helps you.
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/location/strategies.html
Try to mix GPS and Accelerometer
If you detect that GPS stopped working, turn on accelerometer. If GPS is turned on again, calculate distance again with it. This way you can have route with GPS parts and accelerometer ones. The bigger GPS parts, the more accurate data will be
How to get more accuracy by GPS_PROVIDER
Basically if the accuracy of a location isn't acceptable throw it away. The next one will be better.
I am tracking rider's location(bike rider) and calculating total distance travelled per session by him. I have used fused location api only (no GPS). There are times when I am getting jumps in location and due to these jumps extra distance is added,hence results in overall wrong distance. Please help me in finding these wrong latitude and longitudes. Is there any good filter which can be easily implemented in Android or any good method for the same?
Distance measurement on raw GPS data will always be noisy, because the underlying data is often inaccurate. These jumps are due to inaccurate location measurements. To achieve, accurate distance measurements, you can need to filter the noise in the data.
Some useful filtering techniques that you can explore are:
Smoothening location data using Kalman filters - see tutorial
Snapping to road with Google maps snap-to-roads API, or OSRM match service.
If you are looking for an end-to-end solution that gives accurate location data and distance measurements, you can also try the HyperTrack SDK for Android or iOS. You can read about how they filter locations to improve accuracy on their blog. (Disclaimer: I work at HyperTrack.)
Location isn't exact. Even with GPS it isn't. Fused location can be off by hundreds of meters. If you're standing still every few minutes you'll get one reading that's just really off. Sometimes I walk from my kitchen to the bathroom and it thinks I've gone a quarter mile. If you look at the accuracy it returns, remember that there's a 2/3 chance you're within that distance. There's still a 33% chance that you're nowhere within that radius.
You're going to have to accept inaccuracy. There are a few ideas you can do though
1)Ignore all updates unless they travel at least some minimum distance. Adding in all those little amounts will add a lot of inaccuracy quickly.
2)Require at least 2 updates near a new location before accepting that as the new location.
But if you're using network location for short movements- you're going to have a difficult time of it.
Go to Settings -> Location -> Mode.
And make sure the mode is set to Device only.
This will stops the jump
I've ran into a little problem and I don't feel like I'm informed enough to overcome the hurdle.
In essence, I'd like to figure out whether someone is moving over a threshold of say, 40 kmh (~25mph). I get GPS coordinates at designated intervals and compare the distances, which all works fine.
My question is, which method of getting GPS coordinates would work best for this application? Using the Network, using GPS, or both (like, check if the network is connected, else use GPS)?
The summary is, which is the most accurate method?
I'd use the fused location api in this case. In addition, if you want to know if someone is moving you could use the activity recognition of google play services, it requires much less effort and you can even filter by activity: only with car for example (if you want to track over the 40km/h it's unlikely someone is moving on feet).
I am using Google-Play-Services to track user activities. In case of a walking activity or bicycle activity I want to calculate the rough speed the user is moving. Is there any simple method? Location updates by Google-Play-Services are sometimes quite inaccurate since there is no good GPS signal in particular areas.
By the way, I realised the GPS location is getting very accurate when I start the google maps navigation application. I wonder how to get a location with the same percision without starting Google Navigation.
If the Location was created by GPS, then use location.getSpeed().