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Using mobile phone data to evaluate access to essential services following natural hazards
Tessa Swanson1, Seth Guikema1,2
1Industrial and Operations Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
Summary
Natural hazards disrupt access to essential services. This study uses cell phone location data to map service inaccessibility, aiding equitable disaster recovery and community resilience planning.
Area of Science:
- Disaster management and public health
- Geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial analysis
- Human-computer interaction and location-based services
Background:
- Natural hazards significantly impact access to critical services like grocery stores, healthcare, and schools.
- Traditional methods for assessing service access disruptions (surveys, interviews) are resource-intensive and geographically limited.
- Understanding these access changes is vital for equitable disaster recovery and building resilient communities.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop and demonstrate a novel approach for assessing facility-level inaccessibility over broad geographic areas.
- To supplement existing methods by leveraging location-based services (LBS) data from mobile devices.
- To provide researchers and emergency planners with tools to identify affected communities and duration of service disruption.
Main Methods:
- Utilized anonymized location-based services data from cell phones to track changes in access.
- Developed a methodology to analyze facility-level inaccessibility across a wide geographic region.
- Applied the approach to assess access to supermarkets, schools, healthcare facilities, and home improvement stores in Southwest Florida.
Main Results:
- Successfully demonstrated a scalable approach to quantify changes in access to essential services following a natural hazard.
- Identified specific communities and types of facilities experiencing significant inaccessibility during and after Hurricane Irma.
- The LBS data approach offers a more comprehensive and geographically extensive understanding compared to traditional methods.
Conclusions:
- Location-based services data provides a powerful tool for real-time assessment of essential service access disruptions.
- This methodology enhances disaster response planning and supports equitable recovery efforts by highlighting vulnerable populations.
- The approach contributes to building more resilient communities by improving our understanding of post-disaster access challenges.
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