NLR OpenPATH2.2.3 - App Store

The National Laboratory of the Rockies' Open Platform for Agile Trip Heuristics (NLR OpenPATH) enables people to track their travel modes-car, bus, bike, walking, etc.-and measure their associated energy use and carbon footprint.

The app empowers communities to understand their travel mode choices and patterns, experiment with options to make them more sustainable, and evaluate the results. Such results can inform effective transportation policy and planning and be used to build more sustainable and accessible cities.

NLR OpenPATH informs individual users about the impact of their choices, and also makes aggregated, community-level data on mode shares, trip frequencies, and carbon footprints available via a public dashboard.

NLR OpenPATH incorporates continuous data collection and analysis via a smart phone app backed by a server and automated data processing. Its open nature enables transparent data collection and analysis, while allowing it to be configured for individual programs or studies.

On first install, the app does not collect or transmit data. Once you click the link or scan the QR code to join a given study or program, you will be asked to consent to data collection and storage before the app begins functioning. If you are not part of a partner community or program but are simply interested in quantifying your individual carbon footprint, you can join the NLR-run open-access study. In the aggregate, your data might be used as the control for experiments run by our partners.

At its core, the app represents an automatically sensed travel diary, constructed from background sensed location and accelerometer data. You can annotate the diary with semantic labels as requested by a given program administrator or researcher.

Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life. Therefore, the app automatically turns off the GPS if you are not moving. This significantly reduces the battery drain caused by location tracking. The app results in ~ 5% battery drain for up to 3 hours of travel per day.

Version History - Improve the way accessories are handled for vehicle library
- Add features to contact vehicle librarian
- Handle /checkin and /checkout URIs 2.2.3 Sep 26 - Switch codebase structure to Expo Web
- Initial implementation of the vehicle library
- Bug fixes 2.2.2 Sep 11 - Add functionality to automatically update deployment config
- Persist UI state in background for 5 minutes
- Bug fixes 2.1.3 Apr 6 - Improve the ways we collect user feedback
- Update NLR organization name
- Upgrade dependencies 2.0.8 Mar 7 - refactor Profile screen
- optimize user profile fetch and code organization
- upgrade vulnerable packages 2.0.4 11/25/2025 - Support for deployment-specific sensor configs
- Aggregate metrics format changes
- Support disabling dashboard on a per-deployment basis 2.0.2 08/06/2025 - Support multiple modes of interest
- Turn off BLE scanning for non-fleet deployments 2.0.0 03/31/2025 - Fixed issue with sharing logs
- Fixed issue with accessing the diary in the time-use case 1.9.8 02/21/2025 - minor bugfix around displaying draft trips for data that has not yet been sent to the server
- ensure that we register for push notifications even if the user denies notification permission or it is turned off. We use these to send "silent" push notifications that are used for background sync
- for non-fleet deployments, don't move to ONGOING_TRIP even if we see a BLE beacon. This is a corner case since we don't currently have participants who have BLE beacons but are not in a fleet deployment. But it is good to clean it up anyway. 1.9.6 12/21/2024 - Improve the onboarding flow for autogenerated opcodes
- we used to generating the opcode externally and having people scan it,
- this caused confusion as people tried to scan the same opcode and ended up with overlapping trips
- we now pass in the study info and autogenerate in the app
- the flow for pregenerated opcodes is unchanged
- handle scanning opcode through the camera phone properly
- Do not initialize the app UI if the app is launched in the background 1.9.4 11/01/2024 - Reworked dashboard screen
- separated footprint, movement, surveys
- improved footprint calculation, taking time and regional variations into account
- notifications are now optional since silent push notifications work even without the notification permission
- debounced "scan QR code" button to avoid race issues with the QR code scanner if the scan button is pressed multiple times in quick succession 1.9.2 10/14/2024 - Upgrade to latest version of Cordova
- Fix spurious trips in fleet mode caused by VISIT transitions
- Fix issue with aggregate data not being loaded correctly
- Other minor fit and finish fixes 1.8.3 09/10/2024 Update dashboard with recently labeled data. Before this change, new labels had to be fully processed on the server: pushed, and the pipeline run fully. This was clunky and annoying for users. We now recompute the dashboard instantaneously using the locally cached labels for a much smoother user experience. 1.8.0 07/20/2024 - Performance improvement for BLE integration; only read unprocessed entries
- Minor fixes 1.7.7 05/21/2024 - Point release after the BLE fleet integration
- Fix issue with displaying replaced mode for program evaluations
- Disable unused apps check for fleet deployments on work phones 1.7.6 05/06/2024 - Experimental support for using BLE to map vehicles to trips in fleet deployments 1.7.4 04/16/2024 - Cleanup after the react migration
- Optional, experimental support for Bluetooth classic scans in the developer zone 1.6.9 03/30/2024 - Minor bug fixes after the big rewrite
- Accessibility improvements
- fix regression in setting time for reminders 1.6.7 02/26/2024 - Removed all traces of angular, all code is now in react
- App size has been cut down to half through use of webpack
- Switch to geofabrik.de for the OSM services instead of the free version
- Fix issues with backwards compat for older style configs 1.6.3 02/06/2024 - Rewrote onboarding screens in React
- Improved onboarding flow and visual appearance
- Made "verify" checkmark more prominent and visually indicated when it was enabled 1.5.6 10/28/2023 - Re-written and re-designed dashboard
- Re-written logic for the profile/control screen
- Re-written app status page 1.5.1 10/02/2023 - Improved label screen, including clarification and transition between detected and labeled modes
- Hide spurious draft trips to avoid confusion
- Rewrite of profile screen logic 1.4.8 09/19/2023 - Improve accessibility of the label screen
- Make the dropdowns also configurable
- More profile migrations 1.4.5 08/30/2023 - Unified diary and label screen
- Refreshed label screen UI
- Started migration to react
- Add support for Lao
- De-duplicate local storage for greater robustness 1.4.2 08/18/2023 Transpile to es5 for better backwards compatibility 1.3.3 06/23/2023