The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has swept more than 180 countries and territories since late January 2020. As a worldwide emergency response, governments have taken various measures and policies such as self-quarantine, travel restriction, work at home, and region lockdown, to control the rapid spread of this epidemic. The common concept of these countermeasures is to conduct human mobility restrictions as COVID-19 is a highly contagious disease with human-to-human transmission. It becomes an urgent request from medical experts and policymakers to effectively evaluate the effects of human restriction policies with the aid of big data and information technology. Thus, in this study, based on big human mobility data and city POI data, we design an interactive visual analytics system called EpiMob (Epidemic Mobility) to intuitively demonstrate and simulate how the human mobility, as well as the number of infected people , will change according to a certain restriction policy or a combination of policies . EpiMob is made up of a set of coupled modules: a data processing module for data cleansing, interpolation, and indexing; a simulation module based on a modified trajectory-based SEIR model; an interaction visualization module to interactively visualize the analytical results in light of user's settings. Through multiple case studies for the biggest city of Japan (i.e., Tokyo) and domain expert interviews , we demonstrate that our system can be beneficial to give an illustrative insight in measuring and comparing the effects of different human mobility restriction policies for epidemic control.
The outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has swept across more than 180 countries and territories since late January 2020. As a worldwide emergency response, governments have taken various measures and implemented policies, such as self-quarantine, travel restrictions, work from home, and regional lockdown, to control the rapid spread of this epidemic. The common intention of these countermeasures is to restrict human mobility because COVID-19 is a highly contagious disease that is spread by human-to-human transmission. Medical experts and policy makers have expressed the urgency of being able to effectively evaluate the effects of human restriction policies with the aid of big data and information technology. Thus, in this study, based on big human mobility data and city POI data, we designed an interactive visual analytics system named EpiMob (Epidemic Mobility) . The system interactively simulates the changes in human mobility and the number of infected people in response to the implementation of a certain restriction policy or combination of policies (e.g., regional lockdown, telecommuting, screening). Users can conveniently designate the spatial and temporal ranges for different mobility restriction policies, and the result reflecting the infection situation under different policies is dynamically displayed and can be flexibly compared. We completed multiple case studies of the largest metropolitan area in Japan (i.e., Greater Tokyo Area) and conducted interviews with domain experts to demonstrate that our system can provide illustrative insight by measuring and comparing the effects of different human mobility restriction policies for epidemic control.
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