SEPHLA: Challenges and Opportunities Within Environment - Personal Health Archives

Abstract

It is well known that environment and human health have a close relationship. Many researchers have pointed out the high association between the condition of an environment (e.g. pollutant concentrations, weather variables) and the qualification of health (e.g. cardio-respiratory, psychophysiology) [1, 10]. Meanwhile, environment information can be recorded accurately by sensors installed in stations, most of the health information comes from interviews, surveys, or records from medical organizations. The common approach for collecting and analyzing data to discover the association between environment and health outcomes is first isolating a predefined location then collecting all related data inside such a location. The size of this location can be scaled from local (e.g. city, province, country) to global (e.g. region, worldwide) scopes. Nevertheless, this approach cannot give a close-up perspective of an individual scale (i.e. the reaction of individual’s health against his/her surrounding environment during his/her lifetime). To fulfill this gap, we create the SEPHLA: the surrounding-environment personal-health lifelog archive. This purpose of creating this archive is to create a dataset at the individual scale by collecting psychophysiological (e.g. perception, heart rate), pollutant concentrations (e.g. \(PM_{2.5}\), \(NO_{2}\), \(O_{3}\)), weather variables (e.g. temperature, humidity), and urban nature (e.g. GPS, images, comments) data via wearable sensors and smart-phones/lifelog-cameras attached to each person. We explore and exploit this archive for better understanding the impact of an environment on human health at the individual level. We also address challenges of organizing, extending, and searching SEPHLA archive.