Description
How do the environments we live in and the places we visit affect our health? PULSE – Participatory Urban Living for Sustainable Environments, funded by the European Horizon 2020 programme, addressed this question by integrating environmental, health and behavioural data to support a more preventive approach to public health.
The project involved seven cities across Europe, America and Asia, including Pavia, focusing on the relationships between air pollution and asthma, and between physical inactivity and type 2 diabetes. Existing datasets, environmental sensors, satellite information and participatory digital tools helped build a picture of urban living conditions and health risk factors.
Within this framework, the Geomatics Laboratory at DICAr, University of Pavia, contributed to the project’s geospatial component through the integration, analysis and visualisation of geographic information. GIS and WebGIS tools enable data from different sources to be connected, spatial patterns to be explored and complex information to be made accessible through interactive maps.
Geography is essential to understanding people’s exposure to environmental factors: air quality, neighbourhood characteristics and social conditions vary across space and influence everyday life. The laboratory’s contribution brought this spatial perspective to the project, putting geospatial information at the service of health research and better-informed urban decisions.
Pubblications
Parimbelli, E., Pala, D., Bellazzi, R., Vera-Munoz, C., Casella, V.M., 2018. Integrating Environmental Data, Citizen Science and Personalized Predictive Modeling to Support Public Health in Cities: The PULSE WebGIS. AAAI Spring Symposium Series, Health Intelligence.
Pogliaghi, A., Sapio, F., Prada, N., Casella, V.M., Franzini, M., Ottaviano, M., Cabrera, M.F., Arredondo, M.T., 2018. Il WebGIS di PULSE – Piattaforma collaborativa per lo sviluppo di un ambiente urbano sostenibile. Atti della Conferenza ASITA 2018.
Pala, D., Rocca, M.T., Casella, V.M., 2019. Advantages and Difficulties of using Spatial Enablement to Support Public Health in Cities: The PULSE Case Study. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management, pp. 322–329. https://doi.org/10.5220/0007900003220329
Pala, D., Pagán, J., Parimbelli, E., Rocca, M.T., Bellazzi, R., Casella, V.M., 2019. Spatial Enablement to Support Environmental, Demographic, Socioeconomics, and Health Data Integration and Analysis for Big Cities: A Case Study With Asthma Hospitalizations in New York City. Frontiers in Medicine, 6, 84. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmed.2019.00084
Bellazzi, R., Caldarone, A.A., Pala, D., Franzini, M., Malovini, A., Larizza, C., Casella, V.M., 2019. Transfer Learning for Urban Landscape Clustering and Correlation with Health Indexes. How AI Impacts Urban Living and Public Health, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11862, pp. 143–153. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32785-9_13
Casella, V.M., Franzini, M., Rocca, M.T., Pogliaghi, A., Fiscante, N., Raso, L., Sapio, F., 2020. Customized WebGIS Solutions for Exposomics. The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, XLIII-B3-2020, pp. 1431–1438. https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIII-B3-2020-1431-2020
Pala, D., Annovazzi-Lodi, L., Bellazzi, R., Fiscante, N., Franzini, M., Larizza, C., Pogliaghi, A., Raso, L., Rocca, M.T., Sapio, F., Casella, V.M., 2020. The Key Role of Geographic Information in Exposomics: The Example of the H2020 PULSE Project. The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, XLIII-B4-2020, pp. 283–289. https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIII-B4-2020-283-2020
Casella, V.M., Franzini, M., Bellazzi, R., Larizza, C., Pala, D., 2020. Dynamic Assessment of Personal Exposure to Air Pollution for Everyone: A Smartphone-Based Approach. The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, XLIII-B4-2020, pp. 655–663. https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIII-B4-2020-655-2020
