Human Mobility, Spatiotemporal Context, and Environmental Health: Recent Advances in Approaches and Methods

Abstract

"Environmental health researchers have long recognized the importance of geographic context for understanding the effects of different environmental factors on human health. While geographic context and neighborhood effects are fundamental constructs for assessing people’s exposure to contextual or environmental influences, they still tend to be conceptualized largely in static spatial terms, which ignores that people move around in their daily lives and come under the influence of many different neighborhood contexts outside their residential neighborhoods. Past studies also tend to ignore the role of human mobility at various spatial and temporal scales (e.g., daily travel, migratory movements, and movements over the life course) in various health issues. They tend to ignore the temporality of exposures that shapes people’s exposure to environmental influences and subjective wellbeing such as the duration, frequency, and recency of exposure, as well as residential history and cumulative exposure over the life-course.

Recent studies, however, have started to incorporate human mobility, non-residential neighborhoods, and the temporality of exposures through collecting and using data from GPS, accelerometers, mobile phones, various types of sensors, and social media. Innovative approaches and methods have also emerged. This Special Issue aims to showcase studies that use new approaches, methods, and data to examine the role of various forms of human mobility, non-residential contexts, and the temporality of exposures on human health behaviors and outcomes. Studies that illustrate the use of these new methods and data to address questions concerning a wide range of health behaviors and outcomes are welcome. These include but are not limited to individual exposure to air pollution, access to green/blue spaces and subjective wellbeing, environmental influences on physical activity, food environmental and diet behavior, psychosocial stress and drug use behavior, socio-environmental factors that affect sleep patterns and sleep hygiene, risk factors that influence mental health and suicide mortality, exposure to noise and stress, and broader social issues such as environmental justice, health disparities, and racial/ethnic segregation."