Passive Health Monitoring Using Large Scale Mobility Data

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using mobility patterns and demographic data to predict hospital visits. We collect mobility traces from two thousand users for around two months. We extract 16 mobility features from these passively collected mobility traces and train an XGBoost model to predict users' hospital visits. We demonstrate that the designed mobility features can significantly improve prediction accuracy (p < 0.01, AUC = 0.79). We further analyze how these mobility features affect the prediction results and measure their importance by using Shapley additive explanation values. We discover that users with less mobility activity, less visit diversity, and few sports facilities, bountiful entertainment around their visited locations are more likely to visit hospitals. Moreover, we conduct predictions on the populations with different demographic features, which achieves meaningful and insightful results, i.e. maintaining a high mobility activity is crucial for older people's health, while fast food store more substantially affects younger people's health; visit patterns can indicate females' health, while the neighborhood environment is more indicative of males, etc. These results shed light on how to use and understand large scale mobility data in health monitoring and other health-related applications in practice.