JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Human movement is among the essential forces that drive spatial spread of infectious diseases. To date, reducing and tracking human movement during the pandemic have proven effective in limiting the spread of COVID-19. Existing methods for monitoring and modeling the spatial spread of infectious diseases rely on various data sources as proxies of human movement, such as airline travel data, mobile phone data, and dollar bills tracking. However, intrinsic limitations of these data sources prevent us from systematic monitoring and analyses of human movement from different spatial scales (from local to global).

Objective:

Big social media data such as geotagged tweets have been widely used in human mobility studies, yet more research are needed to validate the capabilities and limitations of using such data for studying human movement at different geographic scales (e.g., from local to global) in the context of global infectious disease transmission. This research aims to develop a novel data-driven public health approach using big Twitter data and AI to monitor and analyze human movement at different spatial scales (from global to regional to local) for enhancing situational awareness and risk prediction in public health emergency response and disease surveillance systems.

Methods:

This research will first develop a database with optimized spatiotemporal indexing to store and manage the multi-source datasets collected in this project. This database will be connected to our in-house Hadoop computing cluster for efficient big data computing and analytics. This research will then develop a novel data-driven approach, including innovative data models, predictive models, and computing algorithms, to effectively extract and analyze human movement patterns from big geotagged Twitter data for enhancing situational awareness and risk prediction in public health emergency response and disease surveillance systems.

Results:

This project was funded as of May 2020.

Conclusions:

Results of this study will not only provide enhanced situation awareness for the government at all levels, but also offer valuable contributions to building collective public awareness of the role people play in the evolution of the COVID-19 crisis. The findings of the research may also have implications on policy domain by assisting the policy makers and general public to evaluate the effectiveness of various control measures that aim to reduce the human movement during the pandemic.