Advanced Location-Based Technologies and Services

Since the publication of the first edition in 2004, advances in mobile devices, positioning sensors, WiFi fingerprinting, and wireless communications, among others, have paved the way for developing new and advanced location-based services (LBSs). This second edition provides up-to-date information on LBSs, including WiFi fingerprinting, mobile computing, geospatial clouds, geospatial data mining, location privacy, and location-based social networking. It also includes new chapters on application areas such as LBSs for public health, indoor navigation, and advertising. In addition, the chapter on remote sensing has been revised to address advancements

Development of a wearable global positioning system for place and health research

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>An increasing number of studies suggest that characteristics of context, or the attributes of the places within which we live, work and socialize, are associated with variations in health-related behaviours and outcomes. The challenge for health research is to ensure that these places are accurately represented spatially, and to identify those aspects of context that are related to variations in health and amenable to modification. This study focuses on the design of a wearable global positioning system (GPS) data logger for the purpose of objectively measuring the temporal and spatial features of human activities. Person-specific GPS data provides a useful source of information to operationalize the concept of place.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We designed and tested a lightweight, wearable GPS receiver, capable of logging location information for up to 70 hours continuously before recharging. The device is accurate to within 7 m in typical urban environments and performs well across a range of static and dynamic conditions.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>Rather than rely on static areal units as proxies for places, wearable GPS devices can be used to derive a more complete picture of the different places that influence an individual's wellbeing. The measures are objective and are less subject to biases associated with recall of location or misclassification of contextual attributes. This is important for two reasons. First, it brings a dynamic perspective to place and health research. The influence of place on health is dynamic in that certain places are more or less relevant to wellbeing as determined by the length of time in any location and by the frequency of activity in the location. Second, GPS data can be used to assess whether the characteristics of places at specific times are useful to explaining variations in health and wellbeing.</p

A Comparison Of Food Accessibility From 2002 To 2012 In St. Paul, Minnesota

This study compared the changes in the healthy food accessibility landscape of St. Paul from 2002 to 2012. Food deserts are areas of limited or no accessibility to healthy food options. Local food landscapes in the U.S. and Canada have changed significantly over the past 50 years as many supermarkets have relocated out of the inner cities and into the suburbs. As a result, many inner city neighborhoods no longer have adequate access to healthy food. Despite supermarkets relocating out of the inner city, small and mid-sized grocers could stock healthy food options. The research questions answered are: Where are the underserved areas in St. Paul at the Census Block Group (CBG) level? How has the food desert landscape changed from 2002 to 2012? Which socioeconomic groups have the highest and lowest access to grocery stores and supermarkets? Grocery stores included all types of grocery stores and supermarkets were defined as grocery stores with more than 50 employees. Each food outlet location from 2002 and 2012 was geocoded and distances were calculated from each population-weighted CBG centroid to the nearest food outlet using the Network Analyst extension in ArcGIS 10.1. To be classified as a potential food desert, CBGs have to be more than 1,000 meters from the nearest food establishment by walking distance and more than 3,000 meters or 5,000 meters from the nearest grocery store by public transit. In addition to these criteria, potential food deserts must have a socioeconomic deprivation index above the fifth quintile of all CBGs in St. Paul. The results showed that there were few food deserts in St. Paul in 2002 and 2012 with the inclusion of public transit at the 3,000-meter threshold for grocery stores and at the 5,000-meter threshold for supermarkets. In 2012, the general trend showed more underserved CBGs by both walking and public transit to grocery stores and supermarkets than in 2002. Socioeconomic deprivation was linked to higher grocery store access but lower supermarket access for both 2002 and 2012. Future research and ground truth data is needed to verify if some of the smaller grocers stock healthy food or if there are other sources of healthy food that are accessible to the underserved CBGs identified in this analysis

Efficiency of the built environment: Interdependencies in transportation, development form and public health

Retrofitting existing neighborhoods and communities to remove barriers to walking and allow residents to choose walking as a mode of transportation has the potential to both stabilize energy used for transportation and transportation infrastructure and provide physical activity for improved health, shifting the energy used for transportation from cars to people. This study brings together community-based research, an interdisciplinary team approach, and multi-level modeling to investigate how community design impacts transportation behavior in the context of smaller, northeastern cities. Ten neighborhoods of varying design, connectivity, proximity to services, and average income were selected in each of the cities for a total of twenty neighborhoods studied. A survey of neighborhood residents provided demographic, health, and transportation behavior information. The built environment within the neighborhoods was analyzed using field visits and published GIS data. Data analysis included multi-level modeling to account for the within-neighborhood clustered design of data collection. Working together with the people for whom the results were intended allowed for use of a greater network of contacts for project development and implementation, which helped greatly. Involving municipal and regional authorities throughout the project increased the chances that results will be useful and will reach residents, and resulted in increased communication between the authorities themselves. Presence of sidewalks and intersections were found to be associated with the number of destinations respondents reported walking. Municipalities that would like to increase walking for public health or energy use reduction should investigate improving the condition and availability of sidewalks in neighborhoods, increasing connectivity of pedestrian ways, and improving safety and perceived security at intersections. Age appeared to be the most important demographic factor in decisions to walk, more important than self-reported health or income. Helping the elderly, as they age in place, to continue to feel secure through improved walking surfaces and walking environments could be a fruitful focus of municipal programs and initiatives

The Association Between Neighbourhood Walkability And Adult Body Mass Index In Urban Canada: A Cross-sectional Analysis.

This study sets out to examine whether there was a cross-sectional association between neighbourhood walkability and obesity in adults aged 18 to 64 years. The data source was the 2010/11 cycle of the National Population Health Survey merged with the 2011 Census and DMTI built environment data. A mediation analysis was undertaken to investigate whether physical activity was a mediator in the pathway between a measure of neighbourhood walkability and obesity. Multivariable regression results revealed no statistically significant associations between any of the neighbourhood walkability measures and adult BMI. Similar results were found for males and females. This study did not find that physical activity mediated an association between neighbourhood walkability and adult obesity

Digital traces and urban research : Barcelona through social media data

Most of the world’s population now resides in urban areas, and it is expected that almost all of the planet’s growth will be concentrated in them for the next 30 years, making the improvement of the quality of life in the cities one of the big challenges of this century. To that end, it is crucial to have information on how people use the spaces in the city, and allows urban planning to successfully respond to their needs. This dissertation proposes using data shared voluntarily by the millions of users that make up social network’s communities as a valuable tool for the study of the complexity of the city, because of its capacity of providing an unprecedented volume of urban information, with geographic, temporal, semantic and multimedia components. However, the volume and variety of data raises important challenges regarding its retrieval, manipulation, analysis and representation, requiring the adoption of the best practices in data science, using a multi-faceted approach in the field of urban studies with a strong emphasis in the reproducibility of the developed methodologies. This research focuses in the case of study of the city of Barcelona, using the public data collected from Panoramio, Flickr, Twitter and Instagram. After a literature review, the methods to access the different services are discussed, along with their available data and limitations. Next, the retrieved data is analyzed at different spatial and temporal scales. The first approximation to data focuses on the origins of users who took geotagged pictures of Barcelona, geocoding the hometowns that appear in their Flickr public profiles, allowing the identification of the regions, countries and cities with the largest influx of visitors, and relating the results with multiple indicators at a global scale. The next scale of analysis discusses the city as a whole, developing methodologies for the representation of the spatial distribution of the collected locations, avoiding the artifacts produced by overplotting. To this end, locations are aggregated in regular tessellations, whose size is determined empirically from their spatial distribution. Two spatial statistics techniques (Moran’s I and Getis-Ord’s G*) are used to visualize the local spatial autocorrelation of the areas with exceptionally high or low densities, under a statistical significance framework. Finally, the kernel density estimation is introduced as a non-parametric alternative. The third level of detail follows the official administrative division of Barcelona in 73 neighborhoods and 12 districts, which obeys to historical, morphological and functional criteria. Micromaps are introduced as a representation technique capable of providing a geographical context to commonly used statistical graphics, along with a methodology to produce these micromaps automatically. This technique is compared to annotated scatterplots to relate picture intensity with different urban indicators at a neighborhood scale. The hypothesis of spatial homogeneity is abandoned at the most detailed scale, focusing the analysis on the street network. Two techniques to assign events to road segments in the street graph are presented (direct by shortest distance or by proxy through the postal addresses), as well as the generalization of the kernel density estimation from the Euclidean space to a network topology. Beyond the spatial domain, the interactions of three temporal cycles are further analyzed using the timestamps available in the picture metadata: daytime/nighttime (daily cycle), work/leisure (weekly cycle) and seasonal (yearly cycle).La major part de la població mundial resideix actualment en àrees urbanes, i es preveu que pràcticament tot el creixement del planeta es concentri en elles en els propers 30 anys, convertint la millora de la qualitat de vida a les ciutats en un dels grans reptes del present segle. És per tant imprescindible disposar d'informació sobre les activitats que les persones desenvolupen en elles, que permetin al planejament donar resposta a les seves necessitats. Aquesta tesi proposa l'ús de dades compartides de manera voluntària pels milions d'usuaris que conformen les comunitats de les xarxes socials com una valuosa eina per a l'estudi de la complexitat de la ciutat, per la seva capacitat de proporcionar un volum d'informació urbana sense precedents, reunint components tant geogràfics, temporals, semàntics i multimèdia. No obstant això, aquest volum i varietat de les dades planteja grans reptes pel que fa a la seva obtenció, tractament, anàlisi i representació, requerint adoptar les millors pràctiques de la ciència de dades, aplicades des de múltiples punts de vista al camp dels estudis urbans, posant sempre l'èmfasi en la reproductibilitat de les metodologies desenvolupades. Aquesta investigació se centra en el cas d'estudi de la ciutat de Barcelona, a partir de les dades públiques obtingudes de Panoramio, Flickr, Twitter i Instagram. Després d'una revisió de l'estat de l'art, es desenvolupa l'operativa d'accés als diferents serveis, revisant les dades disponibles i les seves limitacions. A continuació, s'analitzen les dades obtingudes en diferents escales espacials i temporals. La primera aproximació a les dades es desenvolupa a partir de l'origen dels usuaris que han pres fotografies geolocalitzades de Barcelona, a través de la geocodificació de les ubicacions que apareixen en els seus perfils públics de Flickr, permetent identificar les regions, països i ciutats amb major afluència de visitants i relacionar els resultats amb diferents indicadors a escala global. La següent escala d'anàlisi es centra en la ciutat en el seu conjunt, desenvolupant metodologies per a la representació de la distribució espacial de les localitzacions obtingudes, evitant els artefactes produïts per la superposició de mostres. Per a això s'agreguen les localitzacions en tesselacions regulars, la mida de les quals es determina empíricament a partir de la seva distribució espacial. S'utilitzen dues tècniques d'estadística espacial (I de Moran i G* de Getis-Ord) per a visualitzar l'autocorrelació espacial local dels àmbits amb densitats excepcionalment altes o baixes, seguint un criteri de significança estadística. Finalment s'introdueix com a alternativa no paramètrica l'estimació de la densitat. El tercer nivell de detall coincideix amb la delimitació administrativa oficial de Barcelona en 73 barris i 12 districtes, realitzada a partir de criteris històrics, morfològics i funcionals. S'introdueixen els micromapes com a tècnica de representació capaç d'aportar un context geogràfic a gràfics estadístics d'ús comú, juntament amb una metodologia per produir aquests micromapes de manera automàtica. Es compara aquesta tècnica amb diagrames de dispersió anotats per a relacionar la intensitat de fotografies amb diferents indicadors urbans a escala de barri. En l'escala més detallada s'abandona la hipòtesi d'homogeneïtat espacial i es trasllada l'anàlisi al sistema viari. Es presenten dues tècniques d'atribució de localitzacions a trams de carrer del graf vial (directa per distància o indirecta a través de les adreces postals), així com la generalització de l'estimació de la densitat d'un espai euclidià a una topologia de xarxa. Fora del context espacial, s'analitzen les interaccions de tres cicles temporals a partir de les metadades del moment en què van ser preses les fotografies: diürn/nocturn (cicle diari), treball/oci (cicle setmanal) i estacional (cicle anual).Postprint (published version

Digital traces and urban research : Barcelona through social media data

Most of the world’s population now resides in urban areas, and it is expected that almost all of the planet’s growth will be concentrated in them for the next 30 years, making the improvement of the quality of life in the cities one of the big challenges of this century. To that end, it is crucial to have information on how people use the spaces in the city, and allows urban planning to successfully respond to their needs. This dissertation proposes using data shared voluntarily by the millions of users that make up social network’s communities as a valuable tool for the study of the complexity of the city, because of its capacity of providing an unprecedented volume of urban information, with geographic, temporal, semantic and multimedia components. However, the volume and variety of data raises important challenges regarding its retrieval, manipulation, analysis and representation, requiring the adoption of the best practices in data science, using a multi-faceted approach in the field of urban studies with a strong emphasis in the reproducibility of the developed methodologies. This research focuses in the case of study of the city of Barcelona, using the public data collected from Panoramio, Flickr, Twitter and Instagram. After a literature review, the methods to access the different services are discussed, along with their available data and limitations. Next, the retrieved data is analyzed at different spatial and temporal scales. The first approximation to data focuses on the origins of users who took geotagged pictures of Barcelona, geocoding the hometowns that appear in their Flickr public profiles, allowing the identification of the regions, countries and cities with the largest influx of visitors, and relating the results with multiple indicators at a global scale. The next scale of analysis discusses the city as a whole, developing methodologies for the representation of the spatial distribution of the collected locations, avoiding the artifacts produced by overplotting. To this end, locations are aggregated in regular tessellations, whose size is determined empirically from their spatial distribution. Two spatial statistics techniques (Moran’s I and Getis-Ord’s G*) are used to visualize the local spatial autocorrelation of the areas with exceptionally high or low densities, under a statistical significance framework. Finally, the kernel density estimation is introduced as a non-parametric alternative. The third level of detail follows the official administrative division of Barcelona in 73 neighborhoods and 12 districts, which obeys to historical, morphological and functional criteria. Micromaps are introduced as a representation technique capable of providing a geographical context to commonly used statistical graphics, along with a methodology to produce these micromaps automatically. This technique is compared to annotated scatterplots to relate picture intensity with different urban indicators at a neighborhood scale. The hypothesis of spatial homogeneity is abandoned at the most detailed scale, focusing the analysis on the street network. Two techniques to assign events to road segments in the street graph are presented (direct by shortest distance or by proxy through the postal addresses), as well as the generalization of the kernel density estimation from the Euclidean space to a network topology. Beyond the spatial domain, the interactions of three temporal cycles are further analyzed using the timestamps available in the picture metadata: daytime/nighttime (daily cycle), work/leisure (weekly cycle) and seasonal (yearly cycle).La major part de la població mundial resideix actualment en àrees urbanes, i es preveu que pràcticament tot el creixement del planeta es concentri en elles en els propers 30 anys, convertint la millora de la qualitat de vida a les ciutats en un dels grans reptes del present segle. És per tant imprescindible disposar d'informació sobre les activitats que les persones desenvolupen en elles, que permetin al planejament donar resposta a les seves necessitats. Aquesta tesi proposa l'ús de dades compartides de manera voluntària pels milions d'usuaris que conformen les comunitats de les xarxes socials com una valuosa eina per a l'estudi de la complexitat de la ciutat, per la seva capacitat de proporcionar un volum d'informació urbana sense precedents, reunint components tant geogràfics, temporals, semàntics i multimèdia. No obstant això, aquest volum i varietat de les dades planteja grans reptes pel que fa a la seva obtenció, tractament, anàlisi i representació, requerint adoptar les millors pràctiques de la ciència de dades, aplicades des de múltiples punts de vista al camp dels estudis urbans, posant sempre l'èmfasi en la reproductibilitat de les metodologies desenvolupades. Aquesta investigació se centra en el cas d'estudi de la ciutat de Barcelona, a partir de les dades públiques obtingudes de Panoramio, Flickr, Twitter i Instagram. Després d'una revisió de l'estat de l'art, es desenvolupa l'operativa d'accés als diferents serveis, revisant les dades disponibles i les seves limitacions. A continuació, s'analitzen les dades obtingudes en diferents escales espacials i temporals. La primera aproximació a les dades es desenvolupa a partir de l'origen dels usuaris que han pres fotografies geolocalitzades de Barcelona, a través de la geocodificació de les ubicacions que apareixen en els seus perfils públics de Flickr, permetent identificar les regions, països i ciutats amb major afluència de visitants i relacionar els resultats amb diferents indicadors a escala global. La següent escala d'anàlisi es centra en la ciutat en el seu conjunt, desenvolupant metodologies per a la representació de la distribució espacial de les localitzacions obtingudes, evitant els artefactes produïts per la superposició de mostres. Per a això s'agreguen les localitzacions en tesselacions regulars, la mida de les quals es determina empíricament a partir de la seva distribució espacial. S'utilitzen dues tècniques d'estadística espacial (I de Moran i G* de Getis-Ord) per a visualitzar l'autocorrelació espacial local dels àmbits amb densitats excepcionalment altes o baixes, seguint un criteri de significança estadística. Finalment s'introdueix com a alternativa no paramètrica l'estimació de la densitat. El tercer nivell de detall coincideix amb la delimitació administrativa oficial de Barcelona en 73 barris i 12 districtes, realitzada a partir de criteris històrics, morfològics i funcionals. S'introdueixen els micromapes com a tècnica de representació capaç d'aportar un context geogràfic a gràfics estadístics d'ús comú, juntament amb una metodologia per produir aquests micromapes de manera automàtica. Es compara aquesta tècnica amb diagrames de dispersió anotats per a relacionar la intensitat de fotografies amb diferents indicadors urbans a escala de barri. En l'escala més detallada s'abandona la hipòtesi d'homogeneïtat espacial i es trasllada l'anàlisi al sistema viari. Es presenten dues tècniques d'atribució de localitzacions a trams de carrer del graf vial (directa per distància o indirecta a través de les adreces postals), així com la generalització de l'estimació de la densitat d'un espai euclidià a una topologia de xarxa. Fora del context espacial, s'analitzen les interaccions de tres cicles temporals a partir de les metadades del moment en què van ser preses les fotografies: diürn/nocturn (cicle diari), treball/oci (cicle setmanal) i estacional (cicle anual)

Neighborhoods and Sleep Health: Mediating Roles of Psychological Distress and Physical Activity

Sleep has been recognized as a major determinant of physical and mental health. Emerging studies suggested that social and built environments should be considered as important determinants of sleep health, however causal mechanisms between neighborhood factors and sleep health still remain unclear. The proposed dissertation is a connected set of papers including a systematic review and longitudinal studies investigating associations between neighborhood stressors and sleep health as well as potential causal mechanisms via psychological distress and physical activity. The longitudinal studies employed comprehensive measures of neighborhood characteristics and sleep health along with g-estimation and mediation analysis techniques. Neighborhood social and built environments may contribute to poor sleep health, particularly in low-income and racial/ethnic minority neighborhoods, and psychological distress can be a salient pathway linking these neighborhood characteristics and sleep health. Based on our findings, interventions to improve sleep should target modifiable factors and enhance neighborhood environments. These sorts of strategies have the potential to improve not only sleep health but also other health outcomes

ANALYSIS OF GEOGRAPHIC PATTERNS IN MODIFIABLE RISK FACTORS IN PEOPLE WITH DIABETES

Diabetes is a complex chronic disease with many causes, complications and management needs. It affects a large proportion of people of varying ages, income levels, races/ethnicities and geographic areas. Approximately 7.0% of Pennsylvanians have been diagnosed with diabetes. Diabetes is a major public health challenge due to the enormous impact on the affected individual, their families and the health care system. However, recent research has shown that diabetes related mortality and morbidity can be prevented or delayed by controlling risk factors. Certain environmental aspects play an important role in the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases such as diabetes. In order to provide the public health community with another tool to enhance our understanding of the factors that affect the numbers and types of diabetes cases in Pennsylvania, it is important that we undertake a project that will support the analysis of geographic in terms of associated risk factors.This study proposed to investigate geographical patterns of diabetes hospitalizations, risk factors for diabetes complications and glycemic control among individuals with type 2 diabetes in rural regions. Residents of more rural counties are 11% more likely to be hospitalized for uncontrolled diabetes compared to those living in areas that are less rural for every increase in rurality ranking. Furthermore, we demonstrated that there is a clear association between the presence of food stores, food service places, and health care locations with risk factors for diabetes complications among individuals with diabetes. Our findings also indicated that those who live more than ten miles from their diabetes management center are 88% more likely to have an HbA1c level greater than 7.0% compared to those who live less than ten miles from their center, adjusted for individual-level and community level factors. Results demonstrated that for every mile the subjects live from their diabetes management center, they are 2% more likely to have an HbA1c level greater than 7.0%. These findings are of public health significance because they demostrate a clear association between the built envirnment and diabetes hospitalizations, risk factors for diabetes complications and glycemic control among individuals with diabetes in rural regions

Land reuse and redevelopment : creating healthy communities

How land is used and reused can affect public health. There are hundreds of thousands of potentially contaminated sites that were formerly used as industrial, commercial, or residential properties. These sites are called brownfields or land reuse sites. Former gas stations, manufactured gas plants, factories, dry cleaners, and abandoned properties are typical sites that may have people living or working in close proximity to them. Unfortunately, many of these sites are contaminated with harmful chemicals or may even have been redeveloped without proper environmental oversight. These sites may lead to harmful chemical exposures for children and adults.CS316923-ACreating_Healthy_Communities-508.pdf20201013