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Talk title: Computational Challenges in Environmental Epidemiology: Embedding Spatial Data Science, Mobile Health Technology, and Deep Learning into Prospective Cohort Studies
Abstract: The places in which we live, work, play, and age influence our health behaviors, our mental health, our cognitive function, and our chronic disease risk. However, the majority of research on spatial factors and health has relied on residential addresses to assign exposure, questionnaire data to measure health behaviors and health outcomes, and coarse and nonspecific indices to estimate exposure to spatial factors. Recent technological advances have provided opportunities to overcome these limitations. Mobile health technologies—including GPS-enabled smartphones and consumer wearables like Fitbits—have opened new doorways to track personalized exposure and granular data on mental health, cognitive function, and health behaviors from minute to minute. Deep learning algorithms applied to Google Street View images empower us to estimate exposure to specific features of the built and natural environment from an on the ground perspective to quantify their impact on health. In this talk, I will speak about my experience integrating mobile health technologies, consumer wearables, and Google Street View imagery into several prospective cohorts, including the Nurses' Health Studies and Project Viva.
Speaker Bio: Peter James is an Associate Professor in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (HPHC) Institute, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research focuses on estimating the influence of spatial factors, including exposure to nature, the built environment, the food environment, air pollution, light pollution, noise, and socioeconomic status, on health behaviors and chronic disease. More recently, he is developing methodologies to assess real-time, high spatio-temporal resolution objective measures of location and behavior by linking smartphone-based global positioning systems (GPS) and consumer wearable device accelerometry data to understand how spatial factors influence health behaviors. Dr. James earned his ScD from the Department of Environmental Health and the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He holds a MHS in Environmental Health Sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
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