Individual mobility pattern in Malaysia during COVID-19 Recovery Movement Control Order partial lockdown

Abstract

Malaysia Recovery Movement Control Order (RMCO) aims to bring the business, education, tourism and other industry sectors back into operation. Due to movement constraints that result in local economic patterns, individual mobility patterns are expected to occur. However, this matter needs further investigation from people's spatial behaviour during the RMCO. Therefore, this research proposed a new technique for analysing people's spatial behaviour patterns via geo-tagged data. The data from social media users are gathered using data mining techniques. Geographical Information System (GIS) is used to show the geolocation of social media users and analyse their spatial behaviour. The finding of this analysis shows higher people's movement recorded when the RMCO was enforced, a distinctive pattern where spatial trajectory length is high but spatial area coverage is low. It is noticed that the focal points are concentrated in urban areas and tourism attractions. The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).