CalGIS2016

Asthma is a common chronic inflammatory disease of the airways with severe morbidity and mortality in California. It is also an environmental justice concern, as it disproportionately affects poor, communities of color. Asthma attacks are triggered by a variety of environmental exposures but analyzing the relative importance of each exposure is difficult using traditional epidemiological methods. Our research uses a portable GIS sensor to track location and time of rescue asthma inhaler use.
For each inhaler use, we retrospectively estimate environmental exposures, including (1) climate, (2) traffic-related air pollution, (3) ambient air pollution, (4) land use type, and (5) proximal pesticide exposure. We use this data to build an ecologic niche model to map the relative contributions of each environmental layer in predicting the likelihood of asthma inhaler use, and create a predictive model of future asthma attack risk.