Abstract
Severe air pollution has become a major risk to human health from a global environmental perspective. It has been recognized that human mobility is an essential component in individual exposure assessment. Activity structure reflects the characteristics of human mobility. Thus, a better understanding of the relationship between human activity structure and individual exposure level is of crucial relevance. This study examines this relationship using a large cell-phone GPS dataset in Wuhan, China. The results indicate that there is a strong linear relationship between people’s activity structures and exposures to PM2.5. Inter-group comparisons based on the four activity structure groups obtained with K-means clustering found that groups with different activity structures do experience different levels of PM2.5 exposure. Furthermore, differences in detailed characteristics of activity structure were also found at different exposure levels at the intra-group level. These results show that people’s activity structures do influence their exposure levels. The paper provides a new perspective for understanding individual exposure through human activity structure, which helps move the perspective of research on individual exposure from the semantic of physical location to the semantic of human activity pattern.
Highlights
Using the mobile phone GPS data of 15,120 users on a weekday in Wuhan, China, this paper aims to examine two issues: (1) Whether individuals’ activity structures influence their exposure level to PM2.5 ; (2) If it is the case, how different daily activity structures potentially affect the PM2.5 exposure levels people experienced at the group level? To address these questions, the study will first examine the associations between individual activity structure and exposure to PM2.5 using coefficient analysis and linear regression
To explore the relationship between human activity structure and PM2.5 exposure, we cluster the individuals in our sample into different activity structure groups and discuss the relationships between the two at the inter- and intra-group levels
By examining the relationship between people’s activity structure and their PM2.5 exposure levels, this paper provides a new perspective for addressing when, where and how individuals interact with places and how their daily activity structures affect their exposure levels
Summary
Severe air pollution has become a global environmental problem and a major risk to human health [1,2,3,4]. Air pollution can lead to a variety of health problems, such as respiratory and cardiovascular issues, lung cancer, and even premature death [5,6]. It has become a major public health concern in China. More and more studies in recent years focus on the assessment of people’s exposure to and the health impact of air pollution [7,8,9]
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