Public Health

Improving the Efficiency of Healthcare Delivery System in Underdeveloped Rural Areas

Singh, Amarjeet
Naik, Vinayak
Lal, Sangeeta
Sengupta, Raja
Saxena, Deepak
Singh, Pushpendra
Puri, Ankur
2011

A low doctor-to-patient ratio in rural areas of under-developed regions results in an inefficient and expensive delivery of healthcare. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) could play an important role in improving the efficiency and making healthcare more affordable. In this position paper, we present an architectural framework to use ICT (specifically mobile technology) for efficient delivery of healthcare to masses. The proposed framework is (1) comprehensive to cover majority of critical diseases (2) sound from medical science point of view, (3) interfacable to Electronic...

Research Brief: The Changing Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Individuals and Households in the U.S.

Bouzaghrane, Mohamed Amine
Obeid, Hassan
Parker, Madeleine
Li, Meiqing
Hayes, Drake
Chen, Minnie
Frick, Karen Trapenberg
Rodríguez, Daniel
Walker, Joan
Sengupta, Raja
Chatman, Daniel G.
2021

This brief describes findings from a research effort to understand the changing impacts of the pandemic upon households from different places and backgrounds living in the United States. We investigated the effects of the pandemic along with pandemic-based restrictions and rules on people’s behavior along with their mental and emotional health, social relations, and livelihoods. Unlike other research efforts, as far as we are aware this effort is the only one to join passive data from cell phones with survey information collected from the same individuals over time. We combined these data...

Tracking the State and Behavior of People in Response to COVID-1 19 Through the Fusion of Multiple Longitudinal Data Streams

Amine Bouzaghrane, Mohamed
Obeid, Hassan
Hayes, Drake
Chen, Minnie
Li, Meiqing
Parker, Madeleine
Rodríguez, Daniel A.
Chatman, Daniel G.
Trapenberg Frick, Karen
Sengupta, Raja
Walker, Joan
2022

The changing nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of comprehensively considering its impacts and considering changes over time. Most COVID-19 related research addresses narrowly focused research questions and is therefore limited in addressing the complexities created by the interrelated impacts of the pandemic. Such research generally makes use of only one of either 1) actively collected data such as surveys, or 2) passively collected data. While a few studies make use of both actively and passively collected data, only one other study collects it longitudinally...

Tracking the State and Behavior of People in Response to COVID-19 Through the Fusion of Multiple Longitudinal Data Streams

Bouzaghrane, Mohamed Amine
Obeid, Hassan
Hayes, Drake
Chen, Minnie
Li, Meiqing
Parker, Madeleine
Rodríguez, Daniel A.
Chatman, Daniel G.
Frick, Karen Trapenberg
Sengupta, Raja
Walker, Joan
2025

The changing nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of comprehensively considering its impacts and considering changes over time. Most COVID-19 related research addresses narrowly focused research questions and is therefore limited in addressing the complexities created by the interrelated impacts of the pandemic. Such research generally makes use of only one of either (1) actively collected data such as surveys, or (2) passively collected data from sources such as mobile phones or financial transactions. So far, only one other study collects both active and passive...

Development of Comprehensive Roadmap and Resource Guide Towards Congestion Reduction

Lin, Pei-Sung
Hansen, Mark
Wang, Zhenyu
Keita, Yaye
Bialkowska-Jelinska, Elizabeth
Shindgikar, Shubhankar
Khoshnevis, Nikou
University of South Florida. National Institute for Congestion Reduction
2025

Traffic congestion has become an increasingly critical issue across the United States, disrupting transportation networks and impacting society in ways that extend beyond mobility. Congestion contributes to declining public health, reduced quality of life, and environmental concerns such as pollution, noise, and stress (Meyer, 1997). Nationally, travel delays rose from 5.1 billion hours in 2000 to 8.7 billion hours in 2019, while fuel waste increased from 2.4 billion gallons to 3.5 billion gallons over the same period. Similarly, excess greenhouse gas emissions escalated from 25 million...

An Optimal Resource Allocation Tool for Urban Development Using GIS-based Accessibility Measures and Stochastic Frontier Analysis

Goulias, Konstadinos G.
2007

Assessments of transportation investment from a “social efficiency” viewpoint are absent from transportation policy analysis and marketing practice. This is mainly due to the lack of tools capable to assess the role of transportation infrastructure investment on the provision of activity opportunities to residents of each locality. In this report, we demonstrate a tool that identifies specific locations in an entire state where resource allocation has succeeded in maximizing benefits to the public. In addition, the tool and the Geographic Information System maps derived from this tool show...

Flight Time and Flight Traffic Before, During, and After the Pandemic: What Has Changed?

Xu, Jing
Dai, Lu
Hansen, Mark
2024

This paper develops a model for quantifying the relationship between flight volume and its operational performance at the macro level and investigating whether there are any changes before, during, and after the pandemic. Inspired by the market basket concept from economics, we first calculate macro-level effective flight time (EFT) for the U.S. domestic flight market by constructing a flight basket. Semi-log-linear models are developed to formulate the relationship between the total number of flights and macro-level EFT and its components. The estimation results indicate that the total...

(PDF) Quantifying the Impact of Air Travel on Growth of COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

Dai, Lu
Tereshchenko, Ivan
Hansen, Mark
2021

This paper develops models to quantify the dynamics of the impact of air travel on the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, using a wide range of datasets covering the period from March to December 2020. With the help of flight operation data, we first develop a novel approach to estimate the county-level daily air passenger traffic, which combines passenger load factor estimates and information about the air traffic distribution. Cross-sectional models using aggregated county-level variables are estimated. While this study focuses on air travel variables, we also control for potential spatial...

Pedestrian Safety Improvement Program: Phase 2

Griswold, Julia
Medury, Aditya
Huang, Louis
Amos, David
Lu, Jiajian
Schneider, Robert
Grembek, Offer
University of California, Berkeley
2018

The Pedestrian Safety Improvement Program is an effort of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) to identify and address problems with regard to pedestrian safety in California, with the long-term goal of substantially reducing pedestrian fatalities and injuries in California. The efforts and findings presented in this report reflect the work of a team of experts in transportation engineering, transportation planning, public health, geographic information systems, and urban design from the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research & Education Center. In particular,...

Age Density Patterns in Patients Medical Conditions: A Clustering Approach

Alhasoun, Fahad
Aleissa, Faisal
Alhazzani, May
Moyano, Luis G.
Pinhanez, Claudio
González, Marta C.
2018

This paper presents a data analysis framework to uncover relationships between health conditions, age and sex for a large population of patients. We study a massive heterogeneous sample of 1.7 million patients in Brazil, containing 47 million of health records with detailed medical conditions for visits to medical facilities for a period of 17 months. The findings suggest that medical conditions can be grouped into clusters that share very distinctive densities in the ages of the patients. For each cluster, we further present the ICD-10 chapters within it. Finally, we relate the findings...