At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that more than half of all Americans struggle with obesity, heart disease and other chronic health conditions, often due to unhealthy lifestyles. In some cities and states, however, planners are taking direct action against these public health concerns — and using data generated by mobile devices to do so.
Oregon’s Department of Transportation (ODOT) has turned to Strava, a popular fitness app, to better understand the behavior of the state’s runners and cyclists. This app tracks when, where, and most importantly, how runners run and cyclists ride, tracing their routes with the phone’s GPS. State planners, who paid $20,000 for one year of access to the maps this data generates, use the locational information to determine the effectiveness of current bike paths and decide where new ones could be built. ODOT already has put Strava data to use, analyzing cyclists’ speed on the state’s highways. They determined that rumble strips — designed to keep vehicle drivers alert — were a source of danger for cyclists, and took this into account in their placement of new ones. Strava — which, according to the company, collects 2.5 million GPS-tracked activities per week — offers an invaluable set of data to planners who would otherwise have few analytical tools to quantify pedestrian and cyclist behavior.
Louisville, Ky., has a large population of individuals with breathing disorders such as asthmaand COPD. To combatthe problem, in May 2012, the city partnered with Propeller Health to distribute 500 smart inhalers to asthmatic residents. When the devices were used, they sent information on their place and the time to both the patient’s physician and city officials, who used the data to generate “heat maps” of emergency asthma attacks. With the help of data analysts at IBM, public health officials compared the trends against a variety of potential causes — including air quality, pollen outbreaks and traffic congestion — to strategize interventions in the most at-risk areas. Today, the project continues. The city plans to deploy bike-mounted sensors to monitor air quality along routes that are frequented by children during the summer.
In June, I spoke at The Washington Post’s Health Beyond Health Care panel. It was clear, among this interdisciplinary group of doctors, academics, politicians and architects, that public health should include not just hospitals and medicine, but also broad-scale health promotion and health planning. To this end, collecting health-related data directly from citizens not only serves as an effective way of gathering information; it also fosters a sense of civic participation at very little expense to those who generate it.
Usually health-related analytics stay within medicine. They originate from doctors, are filtered through hospitals and are distributed to health insurance companies. But health is shaped by the environment in which people live, work and play — the city — and it is therefore the city’s responsibility to address it.
