Understanding the interaction between human activities and physical health under extreme heat environment in Phoenix, Arizona.

Qunshan Zhao,Dhrumil Shah,Patricia Solís,Ziqi Li,Elizabeth Wentz,Heather Fischer

doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2021.102691

Abstract

Long-term community resilience, which privileges a long view look at chronic issues influencing communities, has begun to draw more attention from city planners, researchers and policymakers. In Phoenix, resilience to heat is both a necessity and a way of life. In this paper, we attempt to understand how residents living in Phoenix experience and behave in an extreme heat environment. To achieve this goal, we introduced a smartphone application (ActivityLog) to study spatio-temporal dynamics of human interaction with urban environments. Compared with traditional paper activity log results we have in this study, the smartphone-based activity log has higher data quality in terms of total number of logs, response rates, accuracy, and connection with GPS and temperature sensors. The research results show that low-income residents in Phoenix mostly stay home during the summer but experience a relatively high indoor temperature due to the lack/low efficiency of air-conditioning (AC) equipment or lack of funds to run AC frequently. Middle-class residents have a better living experience in Phoenix with better mobility with automobiles and good quality of AC. The research results help us better understand user behaviors for daily log activities and how human activities interact with the urban thermal environment, informing further planning policy development. The ActivityLog smartphone application is also presented as an open-source prototype to design a similar urban climate citizen science program in the future.

Highlights

Community resilience is defined in terms of how communities pre pare for, respond to, and recover from shock such as disasters and nat ural hazards including earthquakes, hurricanes, fire, and flooding (Cutter et al, 2014)
Long-term community resilience, which privileges a long view look at chronic issues affecting communities, has begun to draw more attention from city planners, researchers and policymakers (Cutter, 2020)
The smartphone application serves as an open-source prototype for system citizen science data collection

Summary

Introduction

Community resilience is defined in terms of how communities pre pare for, respond to, and recover from shock such as disasters and nat ural hazards including earthquakes, hurricanes, fire, and flooding (Cutter et al, 2014). To enable smartphone data collection through citizen science pro grams, lightweight and low-priced portable sensors (Global Positioning System (GPS), Bluetooth-enabled environmental sensors, etc.) are necessary (Donaire-Gonzalez et al, 2016). These sensors generate continuous streams of fine-grained data with high spatio-temporal res olution, which brings new opportunities for understanding urban envi ronments and urban residents’ behavior (Li et al, 2019; Mafrur et al, 2015). The new type of sensor-based in situ information from portable sensing platforms facilitates – even compels – the development of new methodological approaches and analytical frameworks to un derstand or innovate old and new urban issues

Objectives

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Discussion

Conclusion