Mapping intra-urban transmission risk of dengue fever with big hourly cellphone data

• Published in: Acta tropica 2016-10, Vol.162, p.188-195
• Main Authors: Mao, Liang, Yin, Ling, Song, Xiaoqing, Mei, Shujiang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cell Phone; Cellphone tracking data; Cities; Dengue - prevention & control; Dengue - transmission; Dengue fever; Geographic Information Systems; GIS; Humans; Public Health Surveillance - methods; Risk Assessment; Spatial uncertainty; Stochastic Processes; Travel; Urban area
• ISSN: 0001-706X; 1873-6254
• DOI: 10.1016/j.actatropica.2016.06.029

•A new framework for mapping intra-urban disease transmission risks.•Integration of massive hourly cellphone tracking records for human mobility.•Stochastic simulations to quantify uncertainty of importation risk.•Spatio-temporally resolved programs for city-wide dengue control. Cellphone tracking has been recently integrated into risk assessment of disease transmission, because travel behavior of disease carriers can be depicted in unprecedented details. Still in its infancy, such an integration has been limited to: 1) risk assessment only at national and provincial scales, where intra-urban human movements are neglected, and 2) using irregularly logged cellphone data that miss numerous user movements. Furthermore, few risk assessments have considered positional uncertainty of cellphone data. This study proposed a new framework for mapping intra-urban disease risk with regularly logged cellphone tracking data, taking the dengue fever in Shenzhen city as an example. Hourly tracking records of 5.85 million cellphone users, combined with the random forest classification and mosquito activities, were utilized to estimate the local transmission risk of dengue fever and the importation risk through travels. Stochastic simulations were further employed to quantify the uncertainty of risk. The resultant maps suggest targeted interventions to maximally reduce dengue cases exported to other places, as well as appropriate interventions to contain risk in places that import them. Given the popularity of cellphone use in urbanized areas, this framework can be adopted by other cities to design spatio-temporally resolved programs for disease control.