Citation:

Isaacs, K. AND P. Egeghy. The Need for a Harmonized Repository for Next-Generation Human Activity Data. ISES Annual Meeting, Henderson, NVISES 2015 Annual Meeting, Henderson, NV, October 18 - 23, 2015.

Impact/Purpose:

The National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) Human Exposure and Atmospheric Sciences Division (HEASD) conducts research in support of EPA mission to protect human health and the environment. HEASD research program supports Goal 1 (Clean Air) and Goal 4 (Healthy People) of EPA strategic plan. More specifically, our division conducts research to characterize the movement of pollutants from the source to contact with humans. Our multidisciplinary research program produces Methods, Measurements, and Models to identify relationships between and characterize processes that link source emissions, environmental concentrations, human exposures, and target-tissue dose. The impact of these tools is improved regulatory programs and policies for EPA.

Description:

Multi-tiered human time-activity-location data can inform many efforts to describe human exposures to air pollutants and other chemicals on a range of temporal and spatial scales. In the last decade, EPA's Consolidated Human Activity Database (CHAD) has served as a harmonized repository for traditional questionnaire and diary-based human activity pattern information. However, as the use of new technologies for monitoring activity and location become more prevalent, a need arises for the development of database platforms for storing large amounts of digital data describing human movement and activities in concert with relevant demographic, temporal, spatial, and other metadata. These databases should be flexible enough to archive (for example) time-dependent GPS, accelerometry, consumer product use, food intakes, and other digital diary information. In addition, the framework should also be designed to make use of less detailed human behavioral information derived from social media data sources. The conceptual design and development of such a next-generation repository for human activity data should be a harmonized effort between human activity and time-use researchers and relevant government bodies in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. Such a repository, containing detailed information on how individuals behave within their environments will be a critical step in the conceptualization and parameterization of agent-based approaches for human exposure modeling. Such agent based models ideally will enable better characterization and prediction of human exposure, including: contact with multiple pollutant sources over various time scales; exposure-relevant interactions among individuals (e.g., exposures occurring in children due to product use by a parent); and exposure variability within individuals, among individuals within a population, and between human populations.

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