Spatio-Temporal GIS Analysis for Environmental Health
Funding Agency:
National Institute of
Environmental Health Sciences
Principal Investigators:
Collaborators
Project Summary:
This research project focuses on the extraction of
health-related information from geospatial lifelines, which capture
individuals' locations in geographic space at regular or irregular
temporal intervals. The objectives of our work are to develop and
test the theory of geospatial lifelines in the environmental health
sciences by:
- developing methods to trace locations of individual people
(patients, cases, or controls) back through time, to discover
spatial clusters in the past or to determine past environmental
exposures,
- designing, prototyping, and assess computational models that
can deal with large sets of geospatial lifelines and environmental
information, and
- examining the ethical and legal implications of recording
individuals' geospatial lifelines in databases, and establishing
procedures for appropriate restrictions on data analysis and
dissemination.
Geospatial lifeline data consist of series of discrete space-time
samples over the domain of continuous movements, describing an
individual's location in geographic space at regular or irregular
temporal intervals. In the future, space-time pairs may be measured
(e.g., with GPS receivers and digital clocks) or they may be
estimated and recorded manually. Geospatial lifeline data may be
recorded at different resolutions, but in environmental health
applications, we are mainly concerned with data over days to entire
lifetimes, with a resolution of hours to years.
Full
proposal
Last updated on September 20, 1999.
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