Public Health

Mobile Phones and Social Media Empower the Citizen Seismologist

Bray, J.
Dashti, S.
Reilly, J.
Bayen, A.M.
Glaser, S.D.
2014

Emergency responders must "see" the effects of an earthquake clearly and rapidly for effective response. Mobile phone and information technology can be used to measure ground motion intensity parameters and relay that information to emergency responders. However, the phone sensor is an imperfect device and has a limited operational range. Thus, shake table tests were performed to evaluate their reliability as seismic monitoring instruments. Representative handheld devices, either rigidly connected to the table or free to move, measured shaking intensity parameters well. Bias in 5%-damped...

Modeling and Estimation of the Humans' Effect on the CO2 Dynamics Inside a Conference Room

Weekly, Kevin
Bekiaris-Liberis, Nikolaos
Jin, Ming
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2015

We develop a data driven, partial differential equation-ordinary differential equation model that describes the response of the carbon dioxide (CO2) dynamics inside a conference room, due to the presence of humans, or of a user-controlled exogenous source of CO2. We conduct three controlled experiments to develop and tune a model whose output matches the measured output concentration of CO2 inside the room, when known inputs are applied to the model. In the first experiment, a controlled amount of CO2 gas is released inside the room from a regulated supply, and in the second and third...

Reduction in Fall Rate in Dementia Managed Care Through Video Incident Review: Pilot Study

Bayen, Eleonore
Jacquemot, Julien
Netscher, George
Agrawal, Pulkit
Noyce, Lynn Tabb
Bayen, Alexandre
2017

Background: Falls of individuals with dementia are frequent, dangerous, and costly. Early detection and access to the history of a fall is crucial for efficient care and secondary prevention in cognitively impaired individuals. However, most falls remain unwitnessed events. Furthermore, understanding why and how a fall occurred is a challenge. Video capture and secure transmission of real-world falls thus stands as a promising assistive tool. Objective: The objective of this study was to analyze how continuous video monitoring and review of falls of individuals with dementia can support...

Extended, Continuous Measures of Functional Status in Community Dwelling Persons with Alzheimer’s and Related Dementia: Infrastructure, Performance, Tradeoffs, Preliminary Data, and Promise

Zylstra, Bradley
Netscher, George
Jacquemot, Julien
Schaffer, Michael
Shen, Galen
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2018

Background
The past decades have seen phenomenal growth in the availability of inexpensive and powerful personal computing devices. Efforts to leverage these devices to improve health care outcomes promise to remake many aspects of healthcare delivery, but remain in their infancy.
New method
We describe the development of a mobile health platform designed for daily measures of functional status in ambulatory, community dwelling subjects, including those who have Alzheimer’s disease or related neurodegenerative disorders. Using Smartwatches and Smartphones we measure subject...

Building-in-Briefcase: A Rapidly-Deployable Environmental Sensor Suite for the Smart Building

Weekly, Kevin
Jin, Ming
Zou, Han
Hsu, Christopher
Soyza, Chris
Bayen, Alexandre M.
Spanos, Costas
2018

A building’s environment has profound influence on occupant comfort and health. Continuous monitoring of building occupancy and environment is essential to fault detection, intelligent control, and building commissioning. Though many solutions for environmental measuring based on wireless sensor networks exist, they are not easily accessible to households and building owners who may lack time or technical expertise needed to set up a system and get quick and detailed overview of environmental conditions. Building-in-Briefcase (BiB) is a portable sensor network platform that is trivially...

Long-Term Digital Device-Enabled Monitoring of Functional Status: Implications for Management of Persons with Alzheimer's Disease

Manley, Natalie A.
Bayen, Eleonore
Braley, Tamara L.
Merrilees, Jennifer
Clark, Amy M.
Zylstra, Bradley
Schaffer, Michael
Bayen, Alexandre
Possin, Katherine L.
2020

Introduction Informal caregiving is an essential element of health-care delivery. Little data describes how caregivers structure care recipients’ lives and impact their functional status. Methods We performed observational studies of community dwelling persons with dementia (PWD) to measure functional status by simultaneous assessment of physical activity (PA) and lifespace (LS). We present data from two caregiver/care-recipient dyads representing higher and average degrees of caregiver involvement. Results We acquired >42,800 (subject 1); >41,300 (subject 2) PA data points and >...

Health of California’s Loop Detector System

Rajagopal, Ram
Varaiya, Pravin
2007

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) freeway sensor network has two components: the sensor system of 25,000 inductive loop sensors grouped into 8,000 vehicle detector stations (VDS) and covering 30,500 freeway direction-miles; and the communication network over which the sensor measurements are transported to Caltrans Traffic Management Centers. The sensor network is virtually the only source of data for use in traffic operations, performance measurement, planning and traveler information. However, the value of these data is greatly reduced by the poor reliability of the...

Enfoque en Epidemiología de Campo

FOCUS, G de Trabajo
Nelson, A
Mountcastle, SB
Cáceres, DD
Rodriguez, D
2002

La decisión de investigar una epidemia puede estar determinada por varios factores importantes. La limitaciones de recursos financieros y humanos o personal experto pueden impedir hacer investigaciones; aunque estas limitaciones no siempre son insuperables. Existen oportunidades de entrenamiento y asistencia en investigaciones de epidemias, disponibles, por parte de diferentes agencias estatales y federales, como el CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centros de Control de Enfermedades y Prevención de los Estados Unidos). Aunque los costos directos de una investigación...

National Evidence Regarding Behavior and Physical Activity in New Urbanist Neighborhoods

Rodriguez, D
Combs, T
McDonald, N
Schlossberg, MA
Greene, J
Larco, N
2012

Although proponents have emphasized new urbanism’s ability to reduce automobile dependence, increase walking, and improve the health of its residents, there is a paucity of research to support these claims. The authors surveyed residents of 34 neighborhoods in 12 U.S. states to examine whether the travel behavior and physical activity of new urbanist neighborhood residents differed from their conventional suburban counterparts. They used a matched-pair design in which each new urbanist neighborhood was matched with a conventional suburban neighborhood in the same municipality....

Validity of Secondary Retail Food Outlet Data

Fleischhacker, SE
Sharkey, J
Rodriguez, DA
2013

Improving access to healthy foods is a promising strategy to prevent nutrition-related chronic diseases. To characterize retail food environments and identify areas with limited retail access, researchers, government programs, and community advocates have primarily used secondary retail food outlet data sources (e.g., InfoUSA or government food registries). To advance the state of the science on measuring retail food environments, this systematic review examined the evidence for validity reported for secondary retail food outlet data sources for characterizing retail food environments.