Estimating spatially varying health effects of wildland fire smoke using mobile health data

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wu, Lili, Gao, Chenyin, Yang, Shu, Reich, Brian J., Rappold, Ana G.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914860070076416
author Wu, Lili
Gao, Chenyin
Yang, Shu
Reich, Brian J.
Rappold, Ana G.
author_facet Wu, Lili
Gao, Chenyin
Yang, Shu
Reich, Brian J.
Rappold, Ana G.
contents Wildland fire smoke exposures are an increasing threat to public health, and thus there is a growing need for studying the effects of protective behaviors on reducing health outcomes. Emerging smartphone applications provide unprecedented opportunities to deliver health risk communication messages to a large number of individuals when and where they experience the exposure and subsequently study the effectiveness, but also pose novel methodological challenges. Smoke Sense, a citizen science project, provides an interactive smartphone app platform for participants to engage with information about air quality and ways to protect their health and record their own health symptoms and actions taken to reduce smoke exposure. We propose a new, doubly robust estimator of the structural nested mean model parameter that accounts for spatially- and time-varying effects via a local estimating equation approach with geographical kernel weighting. Moreover, our analytical framework is flexible enough to handle informative missingness by inverse probability weighting of estimating functions. We evaluate the new method using extensive simulation studies and apply it to Smoke Sense data reported by the citizen scientists to increase the knowledge base about the relationship between health preventive measures and improved health outcomes. Our results estimate how the protective behaviors effects vary over space and time and find that protective behaviors have more significant effects on reducing health symptoms in the Southwest than the Northwest region of the USA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2005_12017
institution arXiv
publishDate 2020
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimating spatially varying health effects of wildland fire smoke using mobile health data
Wu, Lili
Gao, Chenyin
Yang, Shu
Reich, Brian J.
Rappold, Ana G.
Methodology
Wildland fire smoke exposures are an increasing threat to public health, and thus there is a growing need for studying the effects of protective behaviors on reducing health outcomes. Emerging smartphone applications provide unprecedented opportunities to deliver health risk communication messages to a large number of individuals when and where they experience the exposure and subsequently study the effectiveness, but also pose novel methodological challenges. Smoke Sense, a citizen science project, provides an interactive smartphone app platform for participants to engage with information about air quality and ways to protect their health and record their own health symptoms and actions taken to reduce smoke exposure. We propose a new, doubly robust estimator of the structural nested mean model parameter that accounts for spatially- and time-varying effects via a local estimating equation approach with geographical kernel weighting. Moreover, our analytical framework is flexible enough to handle informative missingness by inverse probability weighting of estimating functions. We evaluate the new method using extensive simulation studies and apply it to Smoke Sense data reported by the citizen scientists to increase the knowledge base about the relationship between health preventive measures and improved health outcomes. Our results estimate how the protective behaviors effects vary over space and time and find that protective behaviors have more significant effects on reducing health symptoms in the Southwest than the Northwest region of the USA.
title Estimating spatially varying health effects of wildland fire smoke using mobile health data
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.12017