PALMSplus for R

Overview

palmsplusr is an extension to the Personal Activity Location Measurement System (PALMS). This R package provides a customisable platform to combine PALMS data with other sources of information (e.g., shapefiles or csv files). This enables physical activity researchers to answer higher-level questions, such as:

  • How much time is spent in parks?
  • How much MVPA is accumulated in parks?
  • What proportion of sedentary time is accumulated during vehicular travel?
  • What is the average distance of home-to-school trips?
  • How much MVPA is accumulated inside the schoolyard during school time?
  • What proportion of commuters trip chain different travel modes (e.g., walk-bus-walk)
  • What is the average speed of bicycle trips during peak travel times?

The PALMS data are combined with other input files to build the palmsplus simple features data frame. This can then be summarised two ways:

  1. days provides a breakdown of information per day, per person (e.g., time spent in greenspace)
  2. trajectories builds individual trips, and provides trip-level summaries (e.g., MVPA during the work commute). This can then be processed into multimodal trips if desired.

The user is able to specify how each data source is combined. This is done by creating field tables using highly customisable formulas.

Palms Workflow

Palms Workflow

Installation

The easiest way to install palmsplusr is using devtools:

library("devtools")
install_github("TheTS/palmsplusr")

Notes

This project is based on the palmsplus project originally written in PostgreSQL and PostGIS by Bernhard Snizek.