The health threat of air pollution remain located mostly in cities. But the effects
does not only limitate on wellbeing, but are also econonomical. The most vulnerable to
the risks are lower income socio-economic groups that nowadays are also the most
exposed to environmental hazards.
Air pollution indeed does not represent only a sanitary issue: it’s burden reflects
also in increasing medical costs.
Air pollution thus, is a problem can be only addressed with a strategic vision can
only be addressed with long term targeted policies, majorly in urban environments.
In the year 2015 ITU and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
(UNECE) gave the definition of smart and sustainable city as “an innovative city that
uses information and communication technologies (ICTs) and other means to improve
quality of life, efficiency of urban operation and services, and competitiveness, while
ensuring that it meets the needs of present and future generations with respect to economic, social, environmental as well as cultural aspects”. This definition led also in
2016, in the United for Smart Sustainable Cities initiative (U4SSC). This open global
platform responded to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11: “Make cities
and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.”, offering an enabling
environment to spread knowledge and innovation globally [2]. Also the health sector has
been contaminated by this vision: the increase of social networking, cloud-based platforms, and smartphone apps that support data collection has enhance opportunities to
collect data outside of the traditional clinical environment. Such informative explosion
allowed patients to collect and share data among each other, their families and clinicians.
Patient-generated health data (PGHD) is defined as health-related data generated
and recorded by or from patients outside of the clinical areas. This data could be an
important resource available for patient, clinicians and decision makers to be used by to
address a current or emerging health issue, and most of it is globally wide, also if they
are integrated by information coming from diffuse sensory/IoT devices and Manually
input voluntary data reported by the patients, caregivers, or generic citizen participation
bring to shared decision-making. The definitions above helps to understand the context
of PULSE project. PULSE aims to design and build a large-scale data management
system enabling real time analytics of flows of personal data.
The objective is to reduce the environmental and behavioral risk of chronic disease
incidence to allow timely and evidence-driven management of epidemiological episodes linked in particular to two pathologies; asthma and type 2 diabetes in adult
populations. Developing a policy-making across the domains of health, environment,
transport, planning in the PULSE test bed cities.
The project is currently active in eight pilot cities, Barcelona, Birmingham, New
York, Paris, Singapore, Pavia, Keelung and Taiwan, following a participatory approach
where citizen provide data through personal devices and the PulsAIR app, that are
integrated with information from heterogeneous sources: open city data, health systems, urban sensors and satellites. PULSE foster long-term sustainability goal of
establishing an integrated data ecosystem based on continuous large-scale collection of
all stated heterogeneous data available within the smart city environment.
424
D. Vito et al.
does not only limitate on wellbeing, but are also econonomical. The most vulnerable to
the risks are lower income socio-economic groups that nowadays are also the most
exposed to environmental hazards.
Air pollution indeed does not represent only a sanitary issue: it’s burden reflects
also in increasing medical costs.
Air pollution thus, is a problem can be only addressed with a strategic vision can
only be addressed with long term targeted policies, majorly in urban environments.
In the year 2015 ITU and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
(UNECE) gave the definition of smart and sustainable city as “an innovative city that
uses information and communication technologies (ICTs) and other means to improve
quality of life, efficiency of urban operation and services, and competitiveness, while
ensuring that it meets the needs of present and future generations with respect to economic, social, environmental as well as cultural aspects”. This definition led also in
2016, in the United for Smart Sustainable Cities initiative (U4SSC). This open global
platform responded to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11: “Make cities
and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.”, offering an enabling
environment to spread knowledge and innovation globally [2]. Also the health sector has
been contaminated by this vision: the increase of social networking, cloud-based platforms, and smartphone apps that support data collection has enhance opportunities to
collect data outside of the traditional clinical environment. Such informative explosion
allowed patients to collect and share data among each other, their families and clinicians.
Patient-generated health data (PGHD) is defined as health-related data generated
and recorded by or from patients outside of the clinical areas. This data could be an
important resource available for patient, clinicians and decision makers to be used by to
address a current or emerging health issue, and most of it is globally wide, also if they
are integrated by information coming from diffuse sensory/IoT devices and Manually
input voluntary data reported by the patients, caregivers, or generic citizen participation
bring to shared decision-making. The definitions above helps to understand the context
of PULSE project. PULSE aims to design and build a large-scale data management
system enabling real time analytics of flows of personal data.
The objective is to reduce the environmental and behavioral risk of chronic disease
incidence to allow timely and evidence-driven management of epidemiological episodes linked in particular to two pathologies; asthma and type 2 diabetes in adult
populations. Developing a policy-making across the domains of health, environment,
transport, planning in the PULSE test bed cities.
The project is currently active in eight pilot cities, Barcelona, Birmingham, New
York, Paris, Singapore, Pavia, Keelung and Taiwan, following a participatory approach
where citizen provide data through personal devices and the PulsAIR app, that are
integrated with information from heterogeneous sources: open city data, health systems, urban sensors and satellites. PULSE foster long-term sustainability goal of
establishing an integrated data ecosystem based on continuous large-scale collection of
all stated heterogeneous data available within the smart city environment.
424
D. Vito et al.