Time-Use Sequences: A Mixed-Methods Study Exploring How, When, and Where Spatiotemporal Patterns of Everyday Routines Can Strengthen Public Health Interventions.

Background: Behavior change interventions are critical for the secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease and for reducing the risk of a repeat event or mortality. However, the effectiveness of behavior change interventions is challenged by a lack of spatiotemporal contexts, limiting our understanding of factors that influence the timing and location in which day-to-day activities occur and the maintenance of behavior change. This study explored how behavior change interventions could incorporate spatiotemporal contexts of patient activities for modifying behaviors.

Future Blood Debt: Projecting Blood Supply and Demand of Korea Based on Subnational Population Projections (2021-2050).

Background: South Korea faces a critical challenge with its rapidly declining fertility rates and an increasingly aging population, which significantly impacts the country's blood supply and demand. Despite these nationwide trends, regional disparities in blood supply and demand have not been thoroughly studied.

Methods: This research utilized blood donation data from the Korean Red Cross and blood transfusion data from the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service.

Where to place emergency ambulance vehicles: use of a capacitated maximum covering location model with real call data.

This study integrates geographical information systems (GIS) with a mathematical optimization technique to enhance emergency medical services (EMS) coverage in a county in the northeast of Iran. EMS demand locations were determined through one-year EMS call data analysis. We formulated a maximal covering location problem (MCLP) as a mixed-integer linear programming model with a capacity threshold for vehicles using the CPLEX optimizer, an optimization software package from IBM.

The Role of Infant Health Problems in Constraining Interneighborhood Mobility: Implications for Citywide Employment Networks.

Infant health problems are a persistent concern across the United States, disproportionally affecting socioeconomically vulnerable communities. We investigate how inequalities in infant health contribute to differences in interneighborhood commuting mobility and shape neighborhoods' embeddedness in the citywide structure of employment networks in Chicago over a 14-year period. We use the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics' Origin-Destination Employment Statistics to analyze commuting networks between 2002 and 2015.

Multiscale Dimensions of Spatial Process: COVID-19 Fully Vaccinated Rates in U.S. Counties.

Introduction: This study aimed to examine the heterogeneity of the associations between social determinants and COVID-19 fully vaccinated rate.

Methods: This study proposes 3 multiscale dimensions of spatial process, including level of influence (the percentage of population affected by a certain determinant across the entire area), scalability (the spatial process of a determinant into global, regional, and local process), and specificity (the determinant that has the strongest association with the fully vaccinated rate). The multiscale geographically weighted regression was applied to the COVID-19 fully vaccinated rates in U.

One-year spatiotemporal database of Emergency Medical Service (EMS) calls in Mashhad, Iran: data on 224,355 EMS calls.

Objectives: Emergency Medical Services (EMS) is the first point of service for the people who are in critical condition and in need of urgent health care. In Iran, as in other countries, people in need of emergency services often die or are left with a permanent injury due to the poor EMS-related infrastructure. It has been shown that a detailed examination of the response times and the spatiotemporal pattern of EMS calls for service can lead to improvements in time-sensitive patient outcomes.

Depopulation, super aging, and extreme heat events in South Korea.

South Korea's population is declining and its composition changing, associated with lowest-low fertility rates and rapid aging (super aging). When estimating changes in future exposure to extreme heat events (EHE), events that are predicted to be intensified due to climate change, it is important to incorporate demographic dynamics. We analyze business-as-usual (BAU) population and climate scenarios-where BAU refers to no significant change in current processes and trends in either domain-from 2010 to 2060 for South Korea.

Spatio-temporal epidemiology of emergency medical requests in a large urban area. A scan-statistic approach.

Pre-hospital care is provided by emergency medical services (EMS) staff, the initial health care providers at the scene of disaster. This study aimed to describe the characteristics of EMS callers and space-time distribution of emergency requests in a large urban area. Descriptive thematic maps of EMS requests were created using an empirical Bayesian smoothing approach.

Exploring heterogeneities with geographically weighted quantile regression: An enhancement based on the bootstrap approach.

Geographically weighted quantile regression (GWQR) has been proposed as a spatial analytical technique to simultaneously explore two heterogeneities, one of spatial heterogeneity with respect to data relationships over space and one of response heterogeneity across different locations of the outcome distribution. However, one limitation of GWQR framework is that the existing inference procedures are established based on asymptotic approximation, which may suffer computation difficulties or yield incorrect estimates with finite samples. In this paper, we suggest a bootstrap approach to address this limitation.

A spatial analysis of the COVID-19 period prevalence in U.S. counties through June 28, 2020: where geography matters?

Purpose: This study aims to understand how spatial structures, the interconnections between counties, matter in understanding the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) period prevalence across the United States.

Methods: We assemble a county-level data set that contains COVID-19-confirmed cases through June 28, 2020, and various sociodemographic measures from multiple sources. In addition to an aspatial regression model, we conduct spatial lag, spatial error, and spatial autoregressive combined models to systematically examine the role of spatial structure in shaping geographical disparities in the COVID-19 period prevalence.

Racial/ethnic segregation and health disparities: Future directions and opportunities.

Health researchers have investigated the association between racial segregation and racial health disparities with multilevel approaches. This study systematically reviews these multilevel studies and identifies broad trends and potential directions for future research on racial segregation and health disparities in the US. After searching databases including CINAHL and MEDLINE, we identified and systematically reviewed 66 articles published between 2003 and 2019 and found four major gaps in racial/ethnic segregation and health disparities: (a) the concept of segregation was rarely operationalized at the neighborhood level, (b) except for the evenness and exposure dimension, other dimensions of segregation are overlooked, (c) little attention was paid to the segregation between whites and non-black minorities, particularly Hispanics and Asians, and (d) mental health outcomes were largely absent.

Communal Innovations: Inspiring Neighborhoods of Hope and Advocacy.

Innovations promise a better future, which may generate feelings of hope and inspire advocacy. Some innovations are more communal in nature: attempting to address a social problem, through community engagement and wide-spread adoption. For such innovations, the social processes that involve collective aspects of community life may play important roles in fostering hope and interpersonal advocacy.

The geography of sentiment towards the Women's March of 2017.

The Women's March of 2017 generated unprecedented levels of participation in the largest, single day, protest in history to date. The marchers protested the election of President Donald Trump and rallied in support of several civil issues such as women's rights. "Sister marches" evolved in at least 680 locations across the United States.

Neighborhood Walkability and BMI Change: A National Study of Veterans in Large Urban Areas.

Objective: Improving neighborhood walkability has been proposed as a policy intervention to reduce obesity. The objective of this study was to evaluate longitudinal relationships between neighborhood walkability and body weight among adults living in large urban areas.

Methods: In this retrospective longitudinal study of United States military veterans using Department of Veterans Affairs health care, Veterans Affairs clinical and administrative data (2007-2014) were linked to environmental measures constructed from public (2006-2014) and proprietary (2008-2014) sources, and linear regression models with person fixed effects were used to estimate associations between walkability and BMI among 758,434 men and 70,319 women aged 20 to 80 years in 2009 to 2014.

Stability of activity space footprint, size, and environmental features over six months.

As activity space measures are increasingly used to estimate exposure to environmental determinants of health, little is known about the stability of these measures over time. To test the stability of GPS-derived measures of activity-space footprint, size, and environmental features over time, we compared 14-day measures at baseline and six months later for 35 adults in a large city. Activity-space measures were based on convex hulls and 500 m route buffers, and included the geographic footprint (i.

From Census Tracts to Local Environments: An Egocentric Approach to Neighborhood Racial Change.

Most quantitative studies of neighborhood racial change rely on census tracts as the unit of analysis. However, tracts are insensitive to variation in the geographic scale of the phenomenon under investigation and to proximity among a focal tract's residents and those in nearby territory. Tracts may also align poorly with residents' perceptions of their own neighborhood and with the spatial reach of their daily activities.

Modeling the Importance of Within- and Between-County Effects in an Ecological Study of the Association Between Social Capital and Mental Distress.

Introduction: Levels of mental distress in the United States are a health policy concern. The association between social capital and mental distress is well documented, but evidence comes primarily from individual-level studies. Our objective was to examine this association at the county level with advanced spatial econometric methods and to explore the importance of between-county effects.

Protocol for a cross sectional study of cancer risk, environmental exposures and lifestyle behaviors in a diverse community sample: the Community of Mine study.

Background: Physical inactivity and unhealthy diet are modifiable behaviors that lead to several cancers. Biologically, these behaviors are linked to cancer through obesity-related insulin resistance, inflammation, and oxidative stress. Individual strategies to change physical activity and diet are often short lived with limited effects.

Would increasing access to recreational places promote healthier weights and a healthier nation?

Addressing gaps in evidence on causal associations, this study tested the hypothesis that better access to recreational places close to home helps people to maintain lower body mass index (BMI) using a retrospective longitudinal study design and up to 6 years of data for the same individuals (1,522,803 men and 183,618 women). Participants were military veterans aged 20-64 who received healthcare through the U.S.

Convergent validity of an activity-space survey for use in health research.

We explored the validity of a survey measuring activity spaces for use in health research in a racially/ethnically diverse adult sample (n = 86) living in four Chicago neighborhoods. Participants reported on the location and visit frequency of 64 activities and wore a GPS data logger. We assessed the spatial congruence of survey- and GPS-derived convex hull measures and the number of GPS points within 100 m and 1000 m of survey locations.