Our new paper authored by Zhenlong Li, Xiaoming Li, Dwayne Porter, Jiajia Zhang, Yuqin Jiang, Bankole Olatosi, and Sharon Weissman titled “Monitoring the Spatial Spread of COVID-19 and Effectiveness of Control Measures Through Human Movement Data: Proposal for a Predictive Model Using Big Data Analytics” is published in JMIR Research Protocols .
Full paper can be accessed here: http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/24432
Background and objective: Human movement is one of the forces that drive the spatial spread of infectious diseases. To date, reducing and tracking human movement during the COVID-19 pandemic has proven effective in limiting the spread of the virus. 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 banknote tracking. However, intrinsic limitations of these data sources prevent us from systematic monitoring and analyses of human movement on different spatial scales (from local to global). Big data from social media such as geotagged tweets have been widely used in human mobility studies, yet more research is needed to validate the capabilities and limitations of using such data for studying human movement at different geographic scales (eg, from local to global) in the context of global infectious disease transmission. This study aims to develop a novel data-driven public health approach using big data from Twitter coupled with other human mobility data sources and artificial intelligence to monitor and analyze human movement at different spatial scales (from global to regional to local).
