title: Mapping intra-urban transmission risk of dengue fever with big hourly cellphone data.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA. Electronic address: liangmao@ufl.edu.
authors.forename: Liang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Mao
authors.affiliation: Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China.
authors.forename: Ling
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Yin
authors.affiliation: Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China; State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, Remote and Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China.
authors.forename: Xiaoqing
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Song
authors.affiliation: Shenzhen Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Shenzhen, China.
authors.forename: Shujiang
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Mei
mesh_terms: D040421:Cell Phone; D002947:Cities; D003715:Dengue / Q000517:prevention & control / Q000635:transmission*; D040362:Geographic Information Systems; D006801:Humans; D062486:Public Health Surveillance / Q000379:methods*; D018570:Risk Assessment; D013269:Stochastic Processes; D014195:Travel
keywords: Cellphone tracking data; Dengue fever; GIS; Risk assessment; Spatial uncertainty; Urban area