Big Data is Key to Healthier Cities Worldwide

Norma Padron, PhD, is a Research Scientist in the Academy’s Center for Health Innovation and Assistant Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. In December, she visited China, along with an international team of researchers, to explore innovations in urban health.

In early December, as China’s economic fortunes tumbled, I arrived in the country, along with twenty scholars from around the world. As fellows at the 2015 World Social Science conference Big Data in an Urban Context, we were there to share new research on urban centers as varied as Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Adelaide, Australia, and Nairobi, Kenya, as well as learn how Chinese scientists were using data to tame the health and social issues related to living in some of the world’s biggest cities.  

According to the United Nations, by 2050, more than 66 percent of the world’s population is projected to be urban. The resulting high population densities require large, timely and consistent data systems in order to adequately design and deploy resources at the city level.

I began my journey in Xiamen, in the Fujian province. Like so much of China, Xiamen was an excellent place to learn about urban health. Locals refer to it as “not too big,” with a population just over 2 million. “Big” for a Chinese city means 5 million or more—the country has 14 such cities, to America’s 8—making it a perfect incubator for new approaches to population health, the environment, and social services coordination.

During this first part of the conference, I presented my research on Los Angeles and Philadelphia. With a team, I used multisectoral data to address population health concerns, particularly infant mortality. My findings show that while  some of the  data is primarily needed to run complex econometric and predictive models analyzing trends in infant mortality is available, we still need protocols and relationships across sectors to do this in a systematic and collaborative way. Some of these collaborations are already happening in incredibly creative ways, which is encouraging.

The Power of a Tweet

Conference fellows’ presentations covered a broad range of topics, but one theme cut across our work: How do you turn technological innovation and big data into meaningful improvements in the lives of everyday people?

Wen-jie Wu, an associate professor in Real Estate and Urban Studies at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, showed us how he is accomplishing that by harnessing the nearly boundless reach of social media to gather data from the public through In Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. Weibo is used by roughly 30 percent of the country’s Internet users, which is why Wu sees it as an ideal tool to take the emotional pulse of China’s bustling cities. By using machine learning techniques, he searches and aggregates terms used on Weibo that might reveal the moods of a random sample of people identified by geographic location and time of day.

The idea is to chart depressive trends in urban areas in a way that may someday give policy makers enough information to continue China’s success in lowering the country’s erratic and sometimes high suicide rate. Wu has found a way to turn one of China’s biggest problems when it comes coordinating big data—high population density—into a useful research tool.

Connecting Communities

One of the other growing concerns about the concentration of public resources in technological databases is that only high-earning, highly-educated city residents will have access.

Using Brazil’s second largest city, Rio de Janeiro (population more than 6 million) as a research site, Frank Muller, a fellow at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, presented work designed to address this type of inequality.

To increase digital inclusion, he worked with Rio’s government to send trainers into Rio’s favela’s (poorest neighborhoods) to educate people about using technology to report health hazards, crime, pollution, and other issues. They also created small public spaces where people could use technology through free computers and Internet access.

Data as a Path to the Future

By the time I left Xiamen, the old saying, “How do you get to play in Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice” came to mind. Good policy design can only be achieved if we collect and research high-quality data, data, and more data!

Encouragingly, most cities and urban areas around the world are already collecting and analyzing an incredible wealth of data. The fast-paced change in technology and its increasing affordability through cloud-based storage and cheaper information and communication strategies make smart cities an achievable goal.

The next step is to make the best use of these data and our analytical powers. When we succeed, we will see great results such as our current ability to understand and address climate change and genetic health risks.

As a think-tank/do-tank, our work at the Academy is focused on this mission—transforming research into actionable, effective policy. After listening to new ideas from around the world, I’m optimistic about big data’s ability to improve urban health.