A personalized activity-based spatiotemporal risk mapping approach to the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

ABSTRACT The outbreak of the unprecedented Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic calls for innovative risk assessment and mapping approaches to prompt public messaging. Most of the existing approaches aim to present population risks associated with geographic areas (e.g., county), thus providing limited values to guide individuals to take proactive measures against COVID-19. To better facilitate the general public to make informed decisions on daily activity plans, we propose an activity-based spatiotemporal risk mapping approach to capture and represent exposure risk at a personal level. This approach leverages the classical space-time representations to capture personal activity space and measures exposure risk in such activity space. This approach further implements geovisualization designs to communicate measured exposure information. To illustrate the usability of the approach, we have conducted a case study in Denver, Colorado with COVID-19 data from October 2020 and four representative travel profiles.