Systems and Methods to Track Regions Visited by Mobile Devices and Detect Changes in Location Patterns based on Integration of Data from Different Sources

Abstract

Systems and methods including computing patterns of visitation to predefined regions by converting coordinates of mobile devices to cell identifiers and searching a database to find matches between cell identifiers representing regions and the cell identifiers of the device locations. Devices having similar visitation patterns are divided into two groups, based on status data of whether or not information about a region has been transmitted to respective users. The visitation patterns after the transmission are compared by a system between the two groups to measure a difference. Identifiers of devices, users, or households are initially provided to the system without the status data to obtain attributes associated individually with the identifiers. In return, the system is provided with the status data associated with the attributes individually for the devices, users, or households but without sufficient information to map the status data individually to the identifiers of the devices, users, or households.

Description

RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]The present application is a continuation application of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 15 / 602,427, filed May 23, 2017 and issued as U.S. Pat. No. 9,967,714 on May 8, 2018, which is a continuation application of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 15 / 165,983, filed May 26, 2016 and issued as U.S. Pat. No. 9,668,104 on May 30, 2017, the entire disclosure of which application is hereby incorporated herein by reference.[0002]The present application is related to U.S. Pat. No. 9,374,671, issued on Jun. 21, 2016, and U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 2015 / 0348095, published on Dec. 3, 2015, the entire disclosures of which applications are hereby incorporated herein by reference.FIELD OF THE TECHNOLOGY[0003]At least some embodiments of the disclosure relates to data integration techniques to assemble location dependent data about users from different sources while protecting privacy of the users, where the location dependent data is generated at least in part via computatio...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

This approach enables accurate and efficient determination of a mobile device's location within a region, reducing computational intensity and improving precision, while maintaining user privacy by using signed integer numbers and hierarchical grid structures.

Problems solved by technology

However, the location of the mobile device in the form of coordinates of a point on the surface of the earth does not provide sufficient information of interest about the location, such as whether the mobile device is within a particular region associated with a set of known properties.

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