Arbeitsbereich

Migration und Mobilität

Auf einen Blick Projekte Publikationen Team

Projekt

Analyzing Human Mobility with High-Resolution Mobile Network Data: From Disease Vector Spread to Urban Accessibility (Dissertation)

Egor Kotov, Daniela Perrotta, Emilio Zagheni, John Palmer (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spanien), Frederic Bartumeus (Centre d'Estudis Avançats de Blanes (CSIC - CEAB), Spanien)

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Human mobility is fundamental to how societies function, serving as the primary channel for interaction. It has significant implications for transport planning, urban inequality, and public health by structuring economic activity, shaping social ties, and influencing infectious disease spread. These mobility patterns are, in turn, conditioned by the built environment and the spatial accessibility it affords, which determine who can reach jobs, services, and opportunities, as well as how and when. Having a deeper understanding of these relationships is therefore critical for evaluating the social and environmental impacts of mobility.

Research on human mobility has long relied on travel surveys and census data. These sources, however, often suffer from small samples, low temporal frequency, and a narrow focus on commuting or a very specific research question. The widespread availability of anonymized mobile phone records has transformed this landscape. Mobile network data and GPS traces now allow researchers to observe population movement at high levels of spatial and temporal resolution, enabling them to examine behavioral patterns and their consequences with greater precision than was previously possible using traditional data.

This research integrates theoretical and applied aspects of human mobility by using new high-resolution mobile phone data to link city-scale analyses of accessibility and realized movement with national-scale studies of vector dispersal, and thus provides an integrated view from mechanisms to outcomes.

The first set of studies focuses on the relationship between spatial accessibility and actual movement. While accessibility is often used to represent potential mobility, little is known about how it relates to actual mobility. In particular, one study examines this link by leveraging spatiotemporal mobile data consumption patterns in French cities. It tests whether dynamic accessibility metrics (capturing the mobility of temporary visitors) outperform static resident demographics in predicting mobile application internet traffic consumption, thereby challenging the assumption that such traffic primarily reflects the mobility of local residents. A second study relates individual mobility traces to spatial accessibility measures in order to assess how accessibility correlates with mobility metrics, such as the radius of gyration and other established movement measures. Together, these studies position spatial accessibility not only as an outcome of urban infrastructure, but also as a driver of mobility behavior.

A second set of studies leverages newly released open human mobility data in Spain to investigate how travel contributes to the spread of the tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), a vector capable of transmitting several infectious diseases, such as dengue, Zika, and chikungunya. One study provides preliminary evidence linking intermunicipal travel intensity to genetic similarity among mosquito populations, detecting stronger correlations when mobility occurs during peak vector activity hours. A complementary analysis uses the COVID-19 mobility drop as a natural experiment, comparing observed mobility reduction with a "mobility as usual" counterfactual to determine whether changes in movement patterns help explain where and when new mosquito populations appeared. To support reproducibility, this project also contributes the “spanishoddata” R package, which facilitates access to and analysis of Spain’s open mobility datasets that are used in these studies.

Together, these studies shed new light on the question of how accessibility shapes human movement and quantify how mobility drives disease vector spread, while also providing open tools that make mobility research more transparent, comparable, and reproducible.

Schlagworte:

Gesundheitsversorgung, Public Health, Medizin und Epidemiologie, interne Migration, Wohnsituation, Urbanisierung

Schlagworte (Region):

Frankreich, Spanien

Links:

“spanishoddata” R package homepage