GIS Health & Hazards Lab

Welcome to the GIS Health & Hazards Lab

Mapping at the Scale of Intervention

We are spatial scientists with a passion for using geospatial technologies to improve the health of people in our community and in communities around the world. Specifically, we map “at the scale of intervention”. To do this we are leaders in new tool development, including freely available software. Our goal is to maximize the utility of the spatial data we collect and build capacity for communities to collect spatial data on conditions in their own environment. We are experts at solving problems that involve social and environmental spatial data. 

But it is not enough to just map out key locations – these must be contextualized – meaning we need to know why a park is important, why a house has so many overdoses, or why one water point causes so much sickness. Using this approach we can help address the local opioid overdose situation, or identify where post-disaster lags, or where local environments might lead to increased disease outbreaks.

And if we don’t have the right tools for a problem presented to us, we will design them.
 

Research Statement

    Our research is at the intersection of hazards and health working at what we call the scale of intervention. This includes micro environments such as the home, street, and neighborhood, and overseas micro environments within informal settlements or around key features such as water points. This scale is vital as problems are not just identified, but can also be tackled through policy and action with expert collaborators. Our research also follows three interrelated themes: spatial epidemiology, geographic context, and spatial confidentiality.

 
Methodologically, our work usually involves a combination of field geospatial data collection followed by spatial analysis. The methods we work with and develop are constantly changing because of the challenges encountered in the field. Another of our strengths is to develop new software to fully leverage the novel data we collect. 

For example, we have developed a suite of software for the spatial video and spatial video geonarratives we collect. Simply put these geographically encoded videos, which provide a data source to make new maps in even the most challenging environment, can be easily viewed, the coordinates can be corrected, and basic mapping facilitated. Additional software allows for these videos to be combined using online visualization tools meaning that projects can be shared with collaborators at distance. Other tools compress the video, or overlay multiple spatial video paths so that a crawler can identify all those that pass through a common location. 

Using these software, we have supported various projects across the United States, including disaster damage assessment, disaster recovery, blight mapping, even pedestrian injury prediction. While overseas, in locations as diverse as Colombia, Ghana, Haiti and Kenya, we have mapped many different “impossible” landscapes, especially informal settlements and the local WaSH features, or localized risks for mosquito vectored disease 

This software is freely available from us, some will be readily available for download from this website, just get in touch for help. We are always interested in new collaborations.

Our spatial video geonarrative work has gained attention across the United States, where it has been used to consider topics as diverse as asthma, community regeneration, health care access, homelessness, opioid overdoses, post disaster recovery and violence just to name a few examples. By adding an “expert” commentary to the spatial video, we let the environment stimulate the senses, the sights, sounds and smells, helping us provide context to what is happening, or what has happened. From this rich “deep” map we can see how social, spatial and historical factors coincide. We have also used these methods overseas to look at mosquito vectored disease in Colombia, Ghana and Kenya, and the historical setting around the Cambodian genocide. While a spatial video geonarrative provides a richer more spatially contextualized data set than previously possible, it is our software, especially Wordmapper that allows these narratives to be mined for content, both in a topical or spatial way.

Again, this software is freely available from us, and we would love to hear from potential collaborators. 

We have also developed other software to better support spatial field work, combine and mine different space-text data layers, and something we are really proud of, a new software that allows for PSI data to be shared while preserving its spatial interconnections.

If you have any interest in exploring any of these topics further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. 
 

Our Story:

The germ of our work was in the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Remote Sensing and Public Health at Louisiana State University. Our projects there, both domestic and international, were always focused on what we called the scale of intervention. Our mission was to make a difference, to collect the right kind of data, no matter how challenging the topic or environment. Then, Hurricane Katrina hit and we become part of the geospatial response to that catastrophe. From that beginning we began to develop new field technologies, techniques and software as the need arose. Now, fifteen years later we are in the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and we are ready to reach out beyond our current projects to start the next generation of collaborations. 

To do this, we have developed two main field approaches. The first, a spatial video, allows anyone to record video of any landscape. Because the video has coordinates in it, these images become the source for mapping. To really make this approach work we have developed software that allows us to simultaneously view and map spatial video collected using a variety of different cameras.  We can even make “new” spatial video by using a non-spatial camera (even your phone) by then adding in coordinates. Using spatial video, we have addressed different disaster damage assessments and how a community recovers afterwards. We have mapped out blight and its association with local violence. 

In countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, Haiti, Kenya, Nicaragua we have mapped out clean water access and potential mosquito habitats. Spatial video means that any environment can be mapped. It puts you in charge of when and how frequently that data can be collected. In this way we can see how things change over time. Currently we are working on Machine Learning approaches to automate some of this mapping. On our community page and our research page we explore these ideas further because we want to hear from you and talk about where and what we can work on together.

The second method we developed, a spatial video geonarrative, drives hard at adding depth, and adding context to our maps. When we collect our spatial video (by car, by bike, by boat or even walking) if an expert, or a community member, narrates the landscape we move through, then that final map will not only show key locations, but the importance of that place – what happens there and why, and whether it has changed or not. In this way we have heard about why overdoses continue to occur in the same rental building, what it was like to live in fear of local gangs, what is it like to be a mother of multiple children suffering from Asthma, the daily challenges of being homeless, and the hopes and desires of a community as it begins to reinvent itself. Overseas we have used this method to link violence and health, to show how trash can cause disease outbreaks, and what it is like to witness genocide. 

To maximize such powerful narratives, we have developed new software that allows us to map, explore, and mine what is said. By adding multiple narratives together, we build a map deep in meaning. And because we have the video, we can also see what is being described. This combination of image, description and map is powerful. We originated this method, and we continue to explore how it can be improved.

While these two methods are what we are best known for, we also have an extensive record of developing other techniques, such as a new spatial confidentiality software called Privy that allows collaborators to safely work on HIPAA data. And we are also experts in more traditional Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping and analysis. 

Simply put there is a research collaboration page and a community collaboration page. On these we will provide a few snapshot examples of past work and links to papers. There will be a software page where you will be able to download our video mapping tool, our wordmapper tool, and our Privy tool. Other packages are also available by request, but these three are our most popular developments. 

And finally, there is a funding page. Most of our work, and most of our collaborations, are in resource challenged areas. While we will always search for research funding, it is the generosity of benefactors that really gives us the flexibility to grow, to bring in community partners, and to fund students. 

Thank you for visiting our webpage and please feel free to contact us if you have any questions!