A GIS-BASED ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH INFORMATION SOURCE FOR MALAYSIAN CONTEXT

Abstract

In environmental health studies, it is important to have good interaction between human and environment to produce a quality ecosystem. However, this is rather difficult to control due to mass economic development and natural disasters in the past few decades. These situations will eventually cause bad living environment to living species due to environmental hazards, exposures and health. In Malaysia, a real-time environmental health surveillance system has not been readily adopted. There are systems in European countries and the United States which may not be compatible for use in Malaysia. This research aims develop a real-time environmental health surveillance system to mitigate environmental health issues and assist public users to receive earlydetection emergency outbreaks near the location. A comprehensive environmental health ontological model was developed by integrating existing models of environmental health surveillance systems with customized map interfaces to assist public users to receive earlydetection of any emergency outbreaks near the location. The public users can also share and comment on the relevant environmental health outbreaks in social media networks. The proposed real-time environmental health management system (MyEHMS) has gone through the analysis, design, implementation and evaluation cycle. The testing and evaluation was conducted on the first prototype. The initial findings were used to model the final prototype and later the final prototype testing was tested on matching input against a dictionary of known patterns in database and public user query over the output accuracy and effectiveness. In MyEHMS accuracy testing, results showed that the proposed environmental health ontological model and the methods (N-gram approach and multi-tier approach) applied in environmental health management system was able to match most of the inputs from online media news and social media networks in both simulation platforms and real time platforms. However, constant revise of the environmental health ontological model is needed in order to continuously serve the increase number of environmental health issues. Besides, results in MyEHMS user testing also indicated that the environmental health management system has positive potential to be enhanced in order to assist public health in long run. Lastly, the overall results showed that the proposed environmental health ontological model adopted in MyEHMS is able to assist the public users to receive early-detection on emergency outbreaks near the location.