What number of fast-food joints do you come throughout all through your day and what does that need to do together with your well being? Lots, says Abigail Horn, a lead scientist at USC’s Info Sciences Institute (ISI).

Horn led a multidisciplinary group that included researchers from three USC faculties (Viterbi College of Engineering; Dornsife School of Letters, Arts and Sciences; and Keck College of Drugs), MIT, and Sabancı College in Turkey; and labored in collaboration with the LA County Division of Public Well being. They got down to verify whether or not smartphone mobility (i.e., location) knowledge might present a method to measure individuals’s individually-experienced dynamic meals environments, at scale throughout massive and various populations and various bodily environments.

The query was: can we use mobility knowledge to measure individuals’s visits to meals retailers? As a result of that is proxy for consuming meals at that outlet. After which, can we go a step additional to see whether or not visits to meals retailers noticed within the mobility knowledge are predictive of individuals’s dietary illness charges?”

Abigail Horn, lead scientist at USC’s Info Sciences Institute

Location, location, location

“It is nicely established that the bodily surroundings can impression individuals’s consuming selections and subsequently their diet-related well being outcomes, however what we do not know is the extent to which that’s true,” mentioned Horn, who’s a Analysis Assistant Professor within the Daniel J. Epstein Division of Industrial and Programs Engineering on the USC Viterbi College of Engineering.

Bodily meals environments are the precise areas the place individuals purchase meals. “The meals retailers of their neighborhood, or round their office, or any location alongside their day by day path. Issues like grocery shops, eating places, or nook markets,” defined Horn.

These environments have been proven to impression individuals’s diets and subsequently well being outcomes – together with diet-related ailments – in a number of methods. First, mentioned Horn, “When individuals have low bodily entry to wholesome meals, that may induce unhealthy selections out of comfort or necessity.” And second, “Folks might be cued by meals environments. So, for instance, if all through your day you are seeing fast-food retailers time and again, that may cue or set off sure behaviors” (i.e., consuming extra quick meals).

There are a variety of research taking a look at individuals’s house neighborhood meals environments and associating these with meals selections and diet-related ailments. However the findings have been blended, as have the outcomes of public well being initiatives which have centered on house neighborhood meals environments.

Horn defined, “Within the final decade or so, over a billion {dollars} have been invested in public well being interventions in house meals environments. This might imply constructing a grocery retailer in a meals desert [a home neighborhood with limited access to nutritious food] or stocking the nook shops in that neighborhood with contemporary fruit and greens.” However, she continued, “There’s been no measurable impression in growing individuals’s wholesome meals purchases or well being outcomes. So what is going on on right here?”

Kayla de la Haye is likely one of the members of the analysis group who might assist reply that query. De la Haye is the Director of the Institute for Meals System Fairness at USC Dornsife Middle for Financial Analysis, and has a background in public well being, diet, and psychology. “One among my roles on this analysis was to deliver experience in how individuals make selections about what to eat, and the implications of meals environments that inundate individuals with unhealthy choices and put them in danger for a lot of diet-related ailments like weight problems and diabetes.”

Wanting past the neighborhood market

De la Haye has labored with households throughout LA – from Lancaster to LA’s eastside – serving to them with methods to keep away from unhealthy meals and undertake more healthy consuming habits. She mentioned, “So I introduced this real-world data of the challenges Angelenos face in consuming a nutritious diet to our analysis undertaking.”

The group knew from their very own experiences, and from the experiences of households they’ve labored with in wholesome consuming packages, that individuals do not simply eat of their house neighborhood. However they wanted the info to show this on the inhabitants scale. Horn mentioned, “We thought that the shortage of information exhibiting all the locations the place individuals really go to eat and the place they’re spending essentially the most time would possibly clarify why we’re not seeing associations between the house neighborhood meals surroundings and other people’s food plan and well being outcomes.”

So that they turned to smartphones for the info.

For many of us, our smartphone is all the time monitoring our location, and we in all probability share that knowledge with a number of apps. Location knowledge firms combination this knowledge – referred to as “mobility knowledge” – and promote it for promoting. However more and more, it’s being made out there for analysis, corresponding to by Spectus.ai by means of their Social Influence Program, by means of which the info for this examine was obtained.

Esteban Moro led the group at MIT that might assist entry and analyze this knowledge. Moro, a Analysis Scientist at MIT Connection Science mentioned, “Our group has an excessive amount of expertise analyzing and utilizing mobility knowledge in issues like segregation, transportation, city planning, and industrial exercise. We’re specialists in analyzing massive datasets of human habits and reworking them into insightful instruments for city issues. So, our predominant function on this analysis was to offer and analyze population-wide mobility knowledge about meals consumption.”

Bringing collectively all the info

Utilizing census block knowledge for Los Angeles County to point house neighborhoods, and massive mobility knowledge to trace day by day trajectories, the researchers might see all the proximity – the “exposures” – individuals must meals retailers all through their days.

The group appeared particularly at fast-food retailers as a result of quick meals is usually consumed and strongly linked with illness threat. Utilizing “focal point” knowledge they recognized fast-food retailers inside LA County. To herald the well being piece of the puzzle, they accessed survey knowledge from the LA County Well being Division.

“The Los Angeles County Well being Division does a well being survey of the LA inhabitants each three years. We shaped a collaboration with them, they usually had been in a position to share anonymized particular person degree knowledge with us on socio-demographics, weight problems charges, diabetes charges, and really importantly, fast-food consumption frequency for a consultant pattern of the LA inhabitants,” mentioned Horn.

By analyzing the info, the researchers confirmed that your private home neighborhood issues in relation to your threat of diet-related illness, however so does your commute, the trail you’re taking to run your day by day errands, the way you get from level A to level B and all the best way to level Z in your day, and what these factors are.

The outcomes?

“We all know there’s a relationship between fast-food outlet visits and fast-food consumption, in addition to between fast-food consumption and diet-related ailments, however wow, this knowledge supply does a extremely good job of capturing that!” mentioned Horn.

Moro elaborated, “Probably the most shocking result’s that mobility knowledge works like a “trustworthy sign,” i.e., visits to fast-food retailers had been a greater predictor of people’ weight problems and diabetes than their self-reported fast-food consumption, controlling for different identified dangers.”

De la Haye emphasised, “This work demonstrates that large-scale mobility knowledge is the truth is a useful indicator of the place and what individuals eat, and their threat for diet-related illness.”

Why is that this so important?

De la Haye defined, “Measuring what individuals eat is actually troublesome. The truth is, many massive public well being surveys and surveillance instruments have stopped asking individuals about their meals consumption as a result of the info is commonly unreliable (partly as a result of individuals usually neglect the small print of what they ate, and likewise as a result of they do not all the time wish to inform researchers about their much less wholesome meals selections). So, this provides us a brand new device to trace dietary patterns, like consuming quick meals, for giant populations corresponding to residents of cities, counties, or the whole nation.”

What’s subsequent?

“What I am enthusiastic about as a researcher,” mentioned Horn, “is that this opens up mobility knowledge for every kind of investigations into the meals surroundings. Issues like: the place are individuals getting meals at totally different occasions of day? Who’re these individuals? When are they most affected by the choices out there (or unavailable) to them? We are able to actually examine this with large mobility knowledge, as a result of it permits us to have a look at consuming behaviors in massive and new dimensions: at scale throughout the inhabitants, throughout various inhabitants teams, various environmental environment, and over lengthy intervals of time.”

De la Haye underscores the significance of this, “knowledge on inhabitants dietary patterns is a strong device wanted to make public well being packages and insurance policies, and finally scale back well being dangers from one of many main causes of sickness and demise within the U.S.: unhealthy diets.”