Our main motivation is to establish nexus among climate change, urban infrastructure, transportation and health, and to propose active transportation system management strategies (in short term) and urban infrastructure redesign approaches(in long term) that could improve both climate and health.
Studies including WHO’s 2013 report on Health Effects of Particular Matter pointed out that fine particulate matter (PM2.5)has detrimental health and climate effects. They estimated that over 3.1million world-wide deaths in 2010 is due to PM2.5.
Thus, our study will start with particulate matter as we can relatively easily collect such data in real time using a low cost urban sensing system, to be developed in this project using Raspberry Pi with various sensors measuring PM, temperature, and transportation information (i.e., congestion level using travel time). We propose to conduct cross sectional study based on both real time data to be collected using our urban sensing system as well as historical data such as transportation data (e.g., average annual daily traffic, travel time, emissions from traffic, etc.), heath data (e.g., # of hospital visits and deaths due to PM related diseases such as Asthma, and lung cancer), and urban infrastructure data (e.g., urban density, transportation network, travel patterns, outdoor activities, etc.). Our cross sectional study will consider a few selected locations in Northern Virginia (as a test site with health concerns due to high PM measures) and Charlottesville (as control site).
