Advantages and Difficulties of using Spatial Enablement to Support Public Health in Cities: The PULSE Case Study Daniele Pala 1 , Marica Teresa Rocca 2 and Vittorio Casella 2 1 Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy 2 Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy Keywords: Public Health, Spatial Enablement, Asthma, Regression, Big Data. Abstract: Big cities are heterogeneous environments in which socioeconomic and environmental differences among the neighborhoods are pronounced, therefore research projects that aim at informing public health policies at a single city level are being developed. Since most of public health data is referred to some geography, spatial enablement plays a fundamental role when it comes to analysis and visualization of urban health data. The PULSE project, part of the EU Horizon 2020 framework, involves five cities to transform public health from a reactive to a predictive system, and promote wellbeing by developing an integrated data ecosystem based on continuous large-scale collection of information, leading to better-informed data-driven health policy. One of the goals of PULSE is to apply spatial enablement to generate statistics useful to asses public health at a high spatial resolution, allowing to organize interventions at a neighborhood level. In this paper, we present a preliminary spatial enablement study carried out in this context, in which we show opposite sides of its application: while the results are promising, the lack of standardization and protocols in the data collection and representation processes make spatial enablement very difficult to apply to open data. 1 INTRODUCTION The percentage of the world’s population living in urban areas is projected to increase from 54% in 2015 to 60% in 2030 and to 66% by 2050 (United Nations and Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2014). It is important to acknowledge that big cities are perfect labs for innovation aiming at managing demographic and epidemiological transitions (WHO, 2016). Big cities are heterogeneous environments where social, environmental and demographic conditions can vary significantly within relatively small distances. For this reason, studies aiming at improving health and wellbeing in the urban areas have to address the problem at a neighborhood level, taking into account the underlying spatial variability. In line with this principle, the international project named Participatory Urban Living for Sustainable Environments (PULSE) has been funded by the EU Commission under the Horizon 2020 framework to undertake research and innovation in big cities in Europe, the United States and Asia. PULSE is partnering with five important cities – Barcelona, Birmingham, New York, Paris and Singapore – and has two main focuses: the link between air quality and asthma, and the one between physical inactivity and type 2 diabetes. PULSE aims at providing effective solutions to prevent and treat these diseases through an innovative data integration platform, where data will be collected directly from the users/citizens, enrolled in each of the five cities, through a mobile App, and from open data sources and air quality sensors. PULSE aims also at involving public health authorities directly. Besides the App, the PULSE system features also an innovative WebGIS that allows data visualization, a Decision Support System that allows to analyze the data, runs predictive models and sends notifications and advice directly to the users, and dashboards to help public health authorities visualize the situation in the city and design proper interventions. One of the key features of the PULSE system, is the so-called spatial enablement, i.e. the addition of a spatial description to a dataset and/or an analysis procedure. Most of the data regarding public health has a natural spatial reference, since demographic data is collected considering areas of residence of the population, and environmental measurements clearly depend on the geographical zone they are referred to. Although the concept of spatial enablement is not 322 Pala, D., Rocca, M. and Casella, V. Advantages and Difficulties of using Spatial Enablement to Support Public Health in Cities: The PULSE Case Study. DOI: 10.5220/0007900003220329 In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management (GISTAM 2019), pages 322-329 ISBN: 978-989-758-371-1 Copyright c  2019 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved