Public Health

Urban dynamics through the lens of human mobility

Xu, Yanyan
Olmos, Luis E.
Mateo, David
Hernando, Alberto
Yang, Xiaokang
González, Marta C.
2023

The urban spatial structure represents the distribution of public and private spaces in cities and how people move within them. Although it usually evolves slowly, it can change quickly during large-scale emergency events, as well as due to urban renewal in rapidly developing countries. Here we present an approach to delineate such urban dynamics in quasi-real time through a human mobility metric, the mobility centrality index ΔKS. As a case study, we tracked the urban dynamics of eleven Spanish cities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results revealed that their structures became more...

Sharing, collaborating, and benchmarking to advance travel demand research: A demonstration of short-term ridership prediction

Caicedo, Juan D.
Guirado, Carlos
González, Marta C.
Walker, Joan L.
2025

This research foregrounds general practices in travel demand research, emphasizing the need to change our ways. A critical barrier preventing travel demand literature from effectively informing policy is the volume of publications without clear, consolidated benchmarks, making it difficult for researchers and policymakers to gather insights and use models to guide decision-making. By emphasizing reproducibility and open collaboration, we aim to enhance the reliability and policy relevance of travel demand research. We demonstrate this approach in the field of short-term ridership...

Share, Collaborate, Benchmark: Advancing Travel Demand Research through rigorous open-source collaboration

Caicedo, Juan D.
Guirado, Carlos
González, Marta C.
Walker, Joan L.
2024

This research foregrounds general practices in travel demand research, emphasizing the need to change our ways. A critical barrier preventing travel demand literature from effectively informing policy is the volume of publications without clear, consolidated benchmarks, making it difficult for researchers and policymakers to gather insights and use models to guide decision-making. By emphasizing reproducibility and open collaboration, we aim to enhance the reliability and policy relevance of travel demand research. We present a collaborative infrastructure for transit demand prediction...

Influence of Socioeconomic Factors on Transit Demand During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Bogotá’s BRT System

Caicedo, Juan D.
Walker, Joan L.
González, Marta C.
2021

The COVID-19 pandemic restricted most economic and social activities, impacting travel demand for all transportation modes and especially for transit. We hypothesize that the shifts in travel demand varied by socioeconomic status, and we assess the differential impact of COVID-19 in the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) patronage across various socioeconomic groups in Bogotá. We built a database of frequent transit users with data collected by smartcards in Bogota’s BRT system between January and October 2020. For each user in the database, we labeled their home and work stations. Transactions at...

Human mobility reshaped? Deciphering the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on activity patterns, spatial habits, and schedule habits

Bouzaghrane, Mohamed Amine
Obeid, Hassan
González, Marta
2024

Despite the historically documented regularity in human mobility patterns, the relaxation of spatial and temporal constraints, brought by the widespread adoption of telecommuting and e-commerce during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a growing desire for flexible work arrangements in a post-pandemic work, indicates a potential reshaping of these patterns. In this paper, we investigate the multifaceted impacts of relaxed spatio-temporal constraints on human mobility, using well-established metrics from the travel behavior literature. Further, we introduce a novel metric for schedule...

Hand-Hygiene Mitigation Strategies Against Global Disease Spreading through the Air Transportation Network

Nicolaides, Christos
Avraam, Demetris
Cueto-Felgueroso, Luis
González, Marta C.
Juanes, Ruben
2020

The risk for a global transmission of flu-type viruses is strengthened by the physical contact between humans and accelerated through individual mobility patterns. The Air Transportation System plays a critical role in such transmissions because it is responsible for fast and long-range human travel, while its building components—the airports—are crowded, confined areas with usually poor hygiene. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) consider hand hygiene as the most efficient and cost-effective way to limit disease propagation. Results from...

Enhancing human mobility research with open and standardized datasets

Yabe, Takahiro
Luca, Massimiliano
Tsubouchi, Kota
Lepri, Bruno
Gonzalez, Marta C.
Moro, Esteban
2024

Human mobility research intersects with various disciplines, with profound implications for urban planning, transportation engineering, public health, disaster management, and economic analysis. Here, we discuss the urgent need for open and standardized datasets in the field, including current challenges and lessons from other computational science domains, and propose collaborative efforts to enhance the validity and reproducibility of human mobility research.

EEZ Mobility: A Toolf or Modeling Equitable Installation of Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

Clark, Callie
Ozturk, Ayse Tugba
Hong, Preston
Gonzalez, Marta C.
Moura, Scott J.
2022

Public electric vehicle (EV) chargers are unevenly distributed in California with respect to income, race and education-levels. This creates inequitable access to electric mobility especially for low-income communities of color, which. are less likely to have access to home charging stations. These vulnerable communities are also more likely to be located in areas with poor air quality and would therefore benefit from EV adoption. Currently programs exist in California that fund incentives for public EV chargers in “Disadvantaged Communities” but the process for identifying these...

Correlation networks of air particulate matter: a comparative study

Vlachogiannis, Dimitrios M.
Xu, Yanyan
Jin, Ling
González, Marta C.
2021

Over the last decades, severe haze pollution constitutes a major source of far-reaching environmental and human health problems. The formation, accumulation and diffusion of pollution particles occurs under complex temporal scales and expands throughout a wide spatial coverage. Seeking to understand the transport patterns of haze pollutants in China, we review a proposed framework of time-evolving directed and weighted air quality correlation networks. In this work, we evaluate monitoring stations’ time-series data from China and California, to test the sensitivity of the framework to...

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...