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Leveraging citizen science for research and environmental public health through the Smoke Sense initiative: Addressing the growing wildfire problem
Citation:
Rappold, A. Leveraging citizen science for research and environmental public health through the Smoke Sense initiative: Addressing the growing wildfire problem. Society of Toxicology, Baltimore, Maryland, March 11 - 13, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
This talk shows the framework of Smoke Sense study and the first year results. The overarching objective of the Smoke Sense initiative is to develop and maintain an interactive platform for building knowledge about wildfire smoke, health, and protective actions to bridge existing gaps and improve public health outcomes. Key benefits to this citizen science approach include access to individual level responses during smoke events and overcoming potential limitations of conventional research design methods (e.g. the possibility of recall bias or ecologic fallacy, and difficulties in reaching affected populations and collecting of responses over time, etc). In this paper we examine Smoke Sense pilot data for the feasibility to reach target audiences, engage participants on the topic of health impacts of smoke, and gain insights into factors that affect health protective behaviors. Specifically, we investigate the role of personal health, perceptions of risk, and experiencing symptoms in relation to adopting preventive health behaviors
Description:
Exposure to particles and gasses found in wildfire smoke are linked to a range of health outcomes, affecting wellbeing and productivity in the affected communities. We present the protocol and the results of the Smoke Sense study - the first crowd sourced study designed to quantify health impacts attributable to wildland fire smoke. The Smoke Sense study leverages the smartphone app to deliver real-time air quality and recommended health risk messages to participants and facilitates input about the health symptoms and smoke experienced in affected communities as well as actions taken to reduce their exposure. The study adopts principles of gamification to engage participants to learn about how air quality impacts their health and what actions they can take to reduce exposures. From 8/1/2017 through 01/07/2017 Smoke Sense was downloaded 5,000+ times by users who logged into the application 50,000+ times. Approximately 92% of users logged into Smoke Sense more than once. We will present the protocol and the results from the pilot data collection including the magnitude and severity of cardiovascular, respiratory, eyes and ears, and other symptoms; medication usage and doctor’s visits among the participants; actions, including behavioral changes, taken to reduce exposure; and the impact of those actions on the frequency of health outcomes. The Smoke Sense mobile application reached a large user base within a relatively short amount of time and communicated to users about air quality and smoke exposure risks while collecting valuable information on symptoms experienced. Data collected from users reinforce the view that wildfires are an important environmental public health issue.