Presentation by Dr. Li Yi

Abstract:

A rising number of public health research have started to apply mobile sensing devices such as GPS and activity trackers. These gadgets allow researchers to analyze people's daily interactions with environmental features, a method that has lately gained popularity in environmental health and epidemiology research. These studies, however, are sometimes costly due to the expense of the equipment and difficult for participants due to their intense nature (i.e., collecting sensor data every minute). As a result, the data gathering time is often limited to short amount time such as one or two weeks. This is not ideal since the time frame may not be long enough to capture daily activities (such as places visited and distances traveled), resulting in measurement inaccuracies when analyzing daily environmental exposure. However, the widespread availability of smartphones and smartphone-based applications (apps) provides a unique opportunity to overcome some of the drawbacks by exploiting the capabilities of background passive sensors (e.g., GPS, accelerometers) and conducting real-time surveys. This has the potential to significantly increase mobile health surveys, with unprecedented participant numbers and temporal coverage. This presentation will discuss current advancements in the use of smartphone applications, sensors, and wearable devices in many recently completed environmental health and epidemiology studies (Yi et al., 2021, Yi et al., 2022, Yi et al., 2023). This lecture will specifically discuss many ways for combining geolocation and behavioral Big Data, as well as spatial analytics, to examine the links between environmental exposures, health behaviors, and mental health with high geographical and temporal resolution. The session will end with a review of current technological and methodological obstacles in this field, as well as potential prospects, including the incorporation of artificial intelligence-based Street View image segmentations data.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Li Yi is the Thomas O. Pyle Research Fellow in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. Li’s research revolves around public health, spatial data science, and urban planning, with a focus on integrating geospatial and Big Data analytics, mobile health technologies, and artificial intelligence in studying the impact of the built environment, exposure to nature, and socioeconomic factors on health behaviors, mental health, and chronic disease in longitudinal prospective cohorts, including Nurses' Health Studies, Growing Up Today Study, Project Viva, and Maternal and Developmental Risks from Environmental and Social Stressors Study. In the Division of Chronic Disease Research Across the Lifecourse (CoRAL), Li is currently working on several analyses examining the impact of neighborhood characteristics such as greenness exposure, deprivation, walkability on maternal and child health outcomes. Li holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Population, Health and Place from the University of Southern California, an M.S. in Urban Conservation and Spatial Analytics from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.Sc. in Urban Planning from the University College London.

Lunch will be served to those in attendance.

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