Abstract
This study aims to quantitatively model rather than to presuppose whether or not air pollution in Beijing (China) affects people’s activities of daily living (ADLs) based on an Internet of Behaviours (IoB), in which IoT sensor data can signal environmental events that can change human behaviour on mass. Peoples’ density distribution computed by call detail records (CDRs) and air quality data are used to build a fixed effect model (FEM) to analyse the influence of air pollution on four types of ADLs. The following four effects are discovered: Air pollution negatively impacts people going sightseeing in the afternoon; has a positive impact on people staying-in, in the morning and the middle of the day. Air pollution lowers people’s desire to go to restaurants for lunch, but far less so in the evening. As air quality worsens, people tend to decrease their walking and cycling and tend to travel more by bus or subway. We also find a monotonically decreasing nonlinear relationship between air quality index and the average CDR-based distance for each person of two citizen groups that go walking or cycling. Our key and novel contributions are that we first define IoB as a ubiquitous concept. Based on this, we propose a methodology to better understand the link between bad air pollution events and citizens’ activities of daily life. We applied this methodology in the first comprehensive study that provides quantitative evidence of the actual effect, not the presumed effect, that air pollution can significantly affect a wide range of citizens’ activities of daily living.
Highlights
Continuing human urbanisation exacerbates various physical world conditions, e.g., causing air pollution, traffic congestion, habitat destruction, and loss of arable land [1,2,3].This threatens the sustainable development of urbanisation by governments [4]
For the call detail records (CDRs)-based people density distribution spatial scale (Figure A5), in the urban area such as Dongcheng, Xicheng Districts, the people density is much higher than the suburban area such as Huairou, Yanqing Districts, which suggests that the density decreases from the city centre to the surrounding areas
Our research demonstrates that air pollution has a specific negative impact on specific transportation modes, which means that citizens already have an awareness to avoid air pollution
Summary
Continuing human urbanisation exacerbates various physical world conditions, e.g., causing air pollution, traffic congestion, habitat destruction, and loss of arable land [1,2,3]. This threatens the sustainable development of urbanisation by governments [4]. Citizens perceive such negative impacts and are becoming more active to counteract these effects [5]. Governments and businesses may benefit from understanding the quantitative influence of air pollution on peoples’ activities, such as how much their citizens’ curtail their outdoor activities to avoid bad air pollution
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