Articles

Stress experiences in neighborhood and social environments (SENSE): a pilot study to integrate the quantified self with citizen science to improve the built environment and health

Identifying elements of one’s environment—observable and unobservable—that contribute to chronic stress including the perception of comfort and discomfort associated with different settings, presents many meth...

Authors: Benjamin W. Chrisinger and Abby C. King

Differences in physical environmental characteristics between adolescents’ actual and shortest cycling routes: a study using a Google Street View-based audit

The objective evaluation of the physical environmental characteristics (e.g. speed limit, cycling infrastructure) along adolescents’ actual cycling routes remains understudied, although it may provide importan...

Authors: Hannah Verhoeven, Linde Van Hecke, Delfien Van Dyck, Tim Baert, Nico Van de Weghe, Peter Clarys, Benedicte Deforche and Jelle Van Cauwenberg

Spatially explicit assessment of heat health risk by using multi-sensor remote sensing images and socioeconomic data in Yangtze River Delta, China

The increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events, which are potentially associated with climate change in the near future, highlights the importance of heat health risk assessment, a signific...

Authors: Qian Chen, Mingjun Ding, Xuchao Yang, Kejia Hu and Jiaguo Qi

A cross-sectional ecological analysis of international and sub-national health inequalities in commercial geospatial resource availability

Commercial geospatial data resources are frequently used to understand healthcare utilisation. Although there is widespread evidence of a digital divide for other digital resources and infra-structure, it is u...

Authors: Winfred Dotse-Gborgbortsi, Nicola Wardrop, Ademola Adewole, Mair L. H. Thomas and Jim Wright

Association between number of institutions with coronary computed tomography angiography and regional mortality ratio of acute myocardial infarction: a nationwide ecological study using a spatial Bayesian model

Coronary computed tomography angiography (CTA) has demonstrated high diagnostic accuracy for detection of coronary artery stenosis, and healthcare providers can detect coronary artery disease in earlier stages...

Authors: Hideaki Kawaguchi, Soichi Koike, Ryota Sakurai and Kazuhiko Ohe

Residential scene classification for gridded population sampling in developing countries using deep convolutional neural networks on satellite imagery

Conducting surveys in low- and middle-income countries is often challenging because many areas lack a complete sampling frame, have outdated census information, or have limited data available for designing and...

Authors: Robert F. Chew, Safaa Amer, Kasey Jones, Jennifer Unangst, James Cajka, Justine Allpress and Mark Bruhn

Quantifying multi-dimensional attributes of human activities at various geographic scales based on smartphone tracking

Advancement in location-aware technologies, and information and communication technology in the past decades has furthered our knowledge of the interaction between human activities and the built environment. A...

Authors: Xiaolu Zhou and Dongying Li

Evaluation of threshold selection methods for adaptive kernel density estimation in disease mapping

Maps of disease rates produced without careful consideration of the underlying population distribution may be unreliable due to the well-known small numbers problem. Smoothing methods such as Kernel Density Es...

Authors: Warangkana Ruckthongsook, Chetan Tiwari, Joseph R. Oppong and Prathiba Natesan

Evaluating neighborhood structures for modeling intercity diffusion of large-scale dengue epidemics

Dengue fever is a vector-borne infectious disease that is transmitted by contact between vector mosquitoes and susceptible hosts. The literature has addressed the issue on quantifying the effect of individual ...

Authors: Tzai-Hung Wen, Ching-Shun Hsu and Ming-Che Hu

Intelligent judgements over health risks in a spatial agent-based model

Millions of people worldwide are exposed to deadly infectious diseases on a regular basis. Breaking news of the Zika outbreak for instance, made it to the main media titles internationally. Perceiving disease ...

Authors: Shaheen A. Abdulkareem, Ellen-Wien Augustijn, Yaseen T. Mustafa and Tatiana Filatova

Geostatistical modelling of the association between malaria and child growth in Africa

Undernutrition among children under 5 years of age continues to be a public health challenge in many low- and middle-income countries and can lead to growth stunting. Infectious diseases may also affect child ...

Authors: Benjamin Amoah, Emanuele Giorgi, Daniel J. Heyes, Stef van Burren and Peter John Diggle

Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the home: Can area characteristics identify at-risk communities in the Republic of Ireland?

Internationally, the majority of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests where resuscitation is attempted (OHCAs) occur in private residential locations i.e. at home. The prospect of survival for this patient group is...

Authors: Siobhán Masterson, Conor Teljeur, John Cullinan, Andrew W. Murphy, Conor Deasy and Akke Vellinga

Border analysis for spatial clusters

The spatial scan statistic is widely used by public health professionals in the detection of spatial clusters in inhomogeneous point process. The most popular version of the spatial scan statistic uses a circu...

Authors: Fernando L. P. Oliveira, André L. F. Cançado, Gustavo de Souza, Gladston J. P. Moreira and Martin Kulldorff

Current and future distribution of Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus (Diptera: Culicidae) in WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region

Aedes-borne diseases as dengue, zika, chikungunya and yellow fever are an emerging problem worldwide, being transmitted by Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. Lack of up to date information about the distribution...

Authors: Els Ducheyne, Nhu Nguyen Tran Minh, Nabil Haddad, Ward Bryssinckx, Evans Buliva, Frédéric Simard, Mamunur Rahman Malik, Johannes Charlier, Valérie De Waele, Osama Mahmoud, Muhammad Mukhtar, Ali Bouattour, Abdulhafid Hussain, Guy Hendrickx and David Roiz

Factors related with public open space use among adolescents: a study using GPS and accelerometers

Low physical activity levels and high levels of sedentary time among adolescents call for population wide interventions. Public open spaces can be important locations for adolescents’ physical activity. This s...

Authors: Linde Van Hecke, Hannah Verhoeven, Peter Clarys, Delfien Van Dyck, Nico Van de Weghe, Tim Baert, Benedicte Deforche and Jelle Van Cauwenberg

Spatial panorama of malaria prevalence in Africa under climate change and interventions scenarios

Malaria is highly sensitive to climatic variables and is strongly influenced by the presence of vectors in a region that further contribute to parasite development and sustained disease transmission. Mathemat...

Authors: Francois M. Moukam Kakmeni, Ritter Y. A. Guimapi, Frank T. Ndjomatchoua, Sansoa A. Pedro, James Mutunga and Henri E. Z. Tonnang

Measurement of the potential geographic accessibility from call to definitive care for patient with acute stroke

The World Health Organization refers to stroke, the second most frequent cause of death in the world, in terms of pandemic. Present treatments are only effective within precise time windows. Only 10% of thromb...

Authors: J. Freyssenge, F. Renard, A. M. Schott, L. Derex, N. Nighoghossian, K. Tazarourte and C. El Khoury

Spatial smoothing in Bayesian models: a comparison of weights matrix specifications and their impact on inference

When analysing spatial data, it is important to account for spatial autocorrelation. In Bayesian statistics, spatial autocorrelation is commonly modelled by the intrinsic conditional autoregressive prior distr...

Authors: Earl W. Duncan, Nicole M. White and Kerrie Mengersen

Does the edge effect impact on the measure of spatial accessibility to healthcare providers?

Spatial accessibility indices are increasingly applied when investigating inequalities in health. Although most studies are making mentions of potential errors caused by the edge effect, many acknowledge havin...

Authors: Fei Gao, Wahida Kihal, Nolwenn Le Meur, Marc Souris and Séverine Deguen

Analysis of population-level determinants of legionellosis: spatial and geovisual methods for enhancing classification of high-risk areas

Although the incidence of legionellosis throughout North America and Europe continues to increase, public health investigations have not been able to identify a common exposure in most cases. Over 80% of cases...

Authors: Jessie A. Gleason, Kathleen M. Ross and Rebecca D. Greeley

Accessibility of general and specialized obstetric care providers in Germany and England: an analysis of location and neonatal outcome

Health care accessibility is known to differ geographically. With this study we focused on analysing accessibility of general and specialized obstetric units in England and Germany with regard to urbanity, are...

Authors: Jan Bauer, David A. Groneberg, Werner Maier, Roxanne Manek, Frank Louwen and Dörthe Brüggmann

Mapping outdoor habitat and abnormally small newborns to develop an ambient health hazard index

The geography of where pregnant mothers live is important for understanding outdoor environmental habitat that may result in adverse birth outcomes. We investigated whether more babies were born small for gest...

Authors: Charlene C. Nielsen, Carl G. Amrhein and Alvaro R. Osornio-Vargas

Mathematical models for predicting human mobility in the context of infectious disease spread: introducing the impedance model

Mathematical models of human mobility have demonstrated a great potential for infectious disease epidemiology in contexts of data scarcity. While the commonly used gravity model involves parameter tuning and i...

Authors: Kankoé Sallah, Roch Giorgi, Linus Bengtsson, Xin Lu, Erik Wetter, Paul Adrien, Stanislas Rebaudet, Renaud Piarroux and Jean Gaudart

Modelling and mapping tick dynamics using volunteered observations

Tick populations and tick-borne infections have steadily increased since the mid-1990s posing an ever-increasing risk to public health. Yet, modelling tick dynamics remains challenging because of the lack of d...

Authors: Irene Garcia-Martí, Raúl Zurita-Milla, Arnold J. H. van Vliet and Willem Takken

Using meta-quality to assess the utility of volunteered geographic information for science

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) has strong potential to be increasingly valuable to scientists in collaboration with non-scientists. The abundance of mobile phones and other wireless forms of communic...

Authors: Shaun A. Langley, Joseph P. Messina and Nathan Moore

Urban–rural inequalities in suicide mortality: a comparison of urbanicity indicators

Urban–rural disparities in suicide mortality have received considerable attention. Varying conceptualizations of urbanity may contribute to the conflicting findings. This ecological study on Germany assessed h...

Authors: M. Helbich, V. Blüml, T. de Jong, P. L. Plener, M.-P. Kwan and N. D. Kapusta

Mapping child maltreatment risk: a 12-year spatio-temporal analysis of neighborhood influences

‘Place’ matters in understanding prevalence variations and inequalities in child maltreatment risk. However, most studies examining ecological variations in child maltreatment risk fail to take into account th...

Authors: Enrique Gracia, Antonio López-Quílez, Miriam Marco and Marisol Lila

Gardening in the desert: a spatial optimization approach to locating gardens in rapidly expanding urban environments

Food access is a global issue, and for this reason, a wealth of studies are dedicated to understanding the location of food deserts and the benefits of urban gardens. However, few studies have linked these two...

Authors: Elizabeth A. Mack, Daoqin Tong and Kevin Credit

A generic method for improving the spatial interoperability of medical and ecological databases

The availability of big data in healthcare and the intensive development of data reuse and georeferencing have opened up perspectives for health spatial analysis. However, fine-scale spatial studies of ecologi...

Authors: A. Ghenassia, J. B. Beuscart, G. Ficheur, F. Occelli, E. Babykina, E. Chazard and M. Genin

Small-area distribution of multiple sclerosis incidence in western France: in search of environmental triggers

Despite intensive research over several decades, the etiology of multiple sclerosis (MS) remains poorly understood, although environmental factors are supposedly implicated. Our goal was to identify spatial cl...

Authors: Karima Hammas, Jacqueline Yaouanq, Morgane Lannes, Gilles Edan and Jean-François Viel

Univariate and multivariate spatial models of health facility utilisation for childhood fevers in an area on the coast of Kenya

Precise quantification of health service utilisation is important for the estimation of disease burden and allocation of health resources. Current approaches to mapping health facility utilisation rely on spat...

Authors: Paul O. Ouma, Nathan O. Agutu, Robert W. Snow and Abdisalan M. Noor

Does exposure to the food environment differ by socioeconomic position? Comparing area-based and person-centred metrics in the Fenland Study, UK

Retail food environments (foodscapes) are a recognised determinant of eating behaviours and may contribute to inequalities in diet. However, findings from studies measuring socioeconomic inequality in the food...

Authors: Eva R. Maguire, Thomas Burgoine, Tarra L. Penney, Nita G. Forouhi and Pablo Monsivais

The approaches to measuring the potential spatial access to urban health services revisited: distance types and aggregation-error issues

The potential spatial access to urban health services is an important issue in health geography, spatial epidemiology and public health. Computing geographical accessibility measures for residential areas (e.g...

Authors: Philippe Apparicio, Jérémy Gelb, Anne-Sophie Dubé, Simon Kingham, Lise Gauvin and Éric Robitaille

Relative risk estimation of dengue disease at small spatial scale

Dengue is a high incidence arboviral disease in tropical countries around the world. Colombia is an endemic country due to the favourable environmental conditions for vector survival and spread. Dengue surveil...

Authors: Daniel Adyro Martínez-Bello, Antonio López-Quílez and Alexander Torres Prieto

Mobility assessment of a rural population in the Netherlands using GPS measurements

The home address is a common spatial proxy for exposure assessment in epidemiological studies but mobility may introduce exposure misclassification. Mobility can be assessed using self-reports or objectively m...

Authors: Gijs Klous, Lidwien A. M. Smit, Floor Borlée, Roel A. Coutinho, Mirjam E. E. Kretzschmar, Dick J. J. Heederik and Anke Huss

Transforming geographic scale: a comparison of combined population and areal weighting to other interpolation methods

Transforming spatial data from one scale to another is a challenge in geographic analysis. As part of a larger, primary study to determine a possible association between travel barriers to pediatric cancer fac...

Authors: Elaine Hallisey, Eric Tai, Andrew Berens, Grete Wilt, Lucy Peipins, Brian Lewis, Shannon Graham, Barry Flanagan and Natasha Buchanan Lunsford

Ecological niche modeling to determine potential niche of Vaccinia virus: a case only study

Emerging and understudied pathogens often lack information that most commonly used analytical tools require, such as negative controls or baseline data; thus, new analytical strategies are needed to analyze tr...

Authors: Claire A. Quiner and Yoshinori Nakazawa

Online versus in-person comparison of Microscale Audit of Pedestrian Streetscapes (MAPS) assessments: reliability of alternate methods

An online version of the Microscale Audit of Pedestrian Streetscapes (Abbreviated) tool was adapted to virtually audit built environment features supportive of physical activity. The current study assessed int...

Authors: Christine B. Phillips, Jessa K. Engelberg, Carrie M. Geremia, Wenfei Zhu, Jonathan M. Kurka, Kelli L. Cain, James F. Sallis, Terry L. Conway and Marc A. Adams

Spatial variability of excess mortality during prolonged dust events in a high-density city: a time-stratified spatial regression approach

Dust events have long been recognized to be associated with a higher mortality risk. However, no study has investigated how prolonged dust events affect the spatial variability of mortality across districts in...

Authors: Man Sing Wong, Hung Chak Ho, Lin Yang, Wenzhong Shi, Jinxin Yang and Ta-Chien Chan

GridSample: an R package to generate household survey primary sampling units (PSUs) from gridded population data

Household survey data are collected by governments, international organizations, and companies to prioritize policies and allocate billions of dollars. Surveys are typically selected from recent census data; h...

Authors: Dana R. Thomson, Forrest R. Stevens, Nick W. Ruktanonchai, Andrew J. Tatem and Marcia C. Castro

Is gentrification all bad? Positive association between gentrification and individual’s perceived neighborhood collective efficacy in Montreal, Canada

Collective efficacy has been associated with many health benefits at the neighborhood level. Therefore, understanding why some communities have greater collective efficacy than others is important from a publi...

Authors: Madeleine Steinmetz-Wood, Rania Wasfi, George Parker, Lisa Bornstein, Jean Caron and Yan Kestens

Estimating the prevalence of 26 health-related indicators at neighbourhood level in the Netherlands using structured additive regression

Local policy makers increasingly need information on health-related indicators at smaller geographic levels like districts or neighbourhoods. Although more large data sources have become available, direct esti...

Authors: Jan van de Kassteele, Laurens Zwakhals, Oscar Breugelmans, Caroline Ameling and Carolien van den Brink

Developing a data-driven spatial approach to assessment of neighbourhood influences on the spatial distribution of myocardial infarction

There is a growing understanding of the role played by ‘neighbourhood’ in influencing health status. Various neighbourhood characteristics—such as socioeconomic environment, availability of amenities, and soc...

Authors: Wahida Kihal-Talantikite, Christiane Weber, Gaelle Pedrono, Claire Segala, Dominique Arveiler, Clive E. Sabel, Séverine Deguen and Denis Bard

Intersection of neighborhood dynamics and socioeconomic status in small-area walkability: the Heart Healthy Hoods project

Previous studies found a complex relationship between area-level socioeconomic status (SES) and walkability. These studies did not include neighborhood dynamics. Our aim was to study the association between ar...

Authors: Pedro Gullón, Usama Bilal, Alba Cebrecos, Hannah M. Badland, Iñaki Galán and Manuel Franco

Systematic literature review of reproductive outcome associated with residential proximity to polluted sites

This study aims to assess the evidence on adverse pregnancy outcome associated with living close to polluted industrial sites, and identify the strengths and weaknesses of published epidemiological studies. A...

Authors: Wahida Kihal-Talantikite, Denis Zmirou-Navier, Cindy Padilla and Séverine Deguen

Visualizing statistical significance of disease clusters using cartograms

Health officials and epidemiological researchers often use maps of disease rates to identify potential disease clusters. Because these maps exaggerate the prominence of low-density districts and hide potential...

Authors: Barry J. Kronenfeld and David W. S. Wong

Contextual influences affecting patterns of overweight and obesity among university students: a 50 universities population-based study in China

Many studies have examined childhood and adolescent obesity, but few have examined young adults and the effect of their home and current living environments on prevalence rates. The present study explores cont...

Authors: Tingzhong Yang, Lingwei Yu, Ross Barnett, Shuhan Jiang, Sihui Peng, Yafeng Fan and Lu Li

Erratum to: Influence of Pokémon Go on physical activity levels of university players: a cross-sectional study

Authors: Fiona Y. Wong

Characterisation of the natural environment: quantitative indicators across Europe

The World Health Organization recognises the importance of natural environments for human health. Evidence for natural environment-health associations comes largely from single countries or regions, with varie...

Authors: Graham Smith, Marta Cirach, Wim Swart, Audrius Dėdelė, Christopher Gidlow, Elise van Kempen, Hanneke Kruize, Regina Gražulevičienė and Mark J. Nieuwenhuijsen

Optimising spatial accessibility to inform rationalisation of specialist health services

In an era of budget constraints for healthcare services, strategies for provision of services that improve quality whilst saving costs are highly valued. A proposed means to achieve this is consolidation of se...

Authors: Catherine M. Smith, Hannah Fry, Charlotte Anderson, Helen Maguire and Andrew C. Hayward