Notice for the Response to COVID-19

Owing to the travel restrictions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Organizing Committee of MoHeaP 2020 has decided to postpone the workshop to a later date, when hopefully restrictions have been lifted to a degree that will allow conducting face-to-face workshops again. While the 22-24th June 2020 workshop is effectively cancelled, we have developed a contingency plan for meeting in the future.

We decided to hold the workshop 100% online on June 08-23, 2021.

Background

Recent improvements in data collection techniques and data processing and analytical approaches have generated new opportunities to observe and disentangle the links between mobility, health, and place. Differences in provision, access, and use of health-promoting resources have been documented, along with associations between mobility behaviors, environmental contexts, and health outcomes. In particular, the proliferation of data collected with new technologies, such as mobile phones and sensor devices, provides opportunities to address novel research problems. These high-precision multi-sensor monitoring tools track individuals’ micro-scale mobility, challenging a more traditional definition of context with new space-time exposure measures. Multi-sensor approaches further enable researchers to assess additional dimensions of people behaviors (e.g., physical activity, body posture, sleep), environmental exposures based on direct sensing (air pollution and noise sensors) or assessment from location with geographic information systems, emotional and physical response data (e.g. feelings, stress, heart rate, etc.). Despite advances, questions remain regarding best practices, appropriate and potential uses of mobility data, integration of mobility and context, processing of real-life data with machine learning algorithm to derive relevant indicators, privacy, and statistical analytical methods as they relate to health in geospatial contexts as well as the specific relevant health-related constructs. As a result of the increasing volume of spatial-temporal data on individual behaviors, our conceptual framework and analytical methods face additional potential biases and causality issues (e.g., selective daily mobility bias).

The MoHeaP 2020 workshop on Mobility, Health and Place seeks to bring together researchers from different disciplines who examine topics within mobility, health, and place and identify trends and challenges within this domain. The workshop is focused on presenting current research as well as associated discussion. Interested participants should respond to this call by submitting an abstract (400 words) by the 2 March, 2019 deadline through EasyChair (link).

Important dates

• Deadline for abstract submission: 2 March, 2020

• Decisions: 25 March, 2020

• Workshop date: 22-24 June, 2020 --> 08-21 June, 2021 (Presentation Watching Period) / 22-23 June, 2021 (Live Interaction Days)

Aims and scope

In light of the aforementioned questions regarding mobility and health in geospatial contexts, papers that touch on all aspects of the intersection between mobility, health, and place are welcome. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Sensor data analytics for health applications;

• Ambulatory assessment and real-life sensing of movement data;

• Exposure monitoring;

• Real-time mobility analytics;

• mHealth in geospatial contexts;

• Crowdsourcing geospatial health data;

• Spatial patterns and geographic dimensions of physical and mental health and disease;

• Accessibility issues in healthcare provision and use;

• Methodological concerns in geospatial health research;

• Data gaps in emerging geospatial health data and solutions to fill the gaps;

• Privacy issues related to geospatial health data;

• Physical activity in geospatial contexts;

• Causal inference on interactions between mobility, health, and place;

• Sampling, selection, and/or representation biases in geospatial health data collection and processing.

Workshop format

The workshop will be held on 22-24 June, 2020 at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. The workshop program will consist of selected talks on related themes, with associated break-out discussions on those themes and topics arising from the talks. We also aim to hold plenary sessions to compile our findings on emergent trends and key challenges in mobility, health, and place research.

Participation in the workshop will be free of charge. In order to maintain a highly interactive format, the number of participants will be limited.

Workshop submissions

Submissions for the workshop should be abstracts of around 400 words. They should include succinct and sufficient information about research objectives, significance, methods, and (expected) results. There are no strict formatting requirements but all abstracts must contain the essential elements needed to convey your abstract. References can be in any style or format as long as the style is consistent. The abstract should be submitted via the following EasyChair page: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=moheap2020. The workshop will provide the opportunity for interaction and exchange of ideas to expand the initial abstracts into full papers for consideration in the potential journal special issue.

Special Issue

Although independent from it, this workshop is associated with an intended special issue on Mobility, Health, and Place in "Health & Place". Workshop participants or others with interests in the topic may make submissions to the intended special issue. Participation in the workshop does not guarantee acceptance in the special issue and all submissions are subject to the Health & Place review process.​ More information on the workshop is available here [link].

Workshop organizers

• Eun-Kyeong Kim, Department of Geography & URPP “DynAge”, University of Zurich, Switzerland

• Camille Perchoux, Luxemburg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, Luxemburg

• Lindsey Conrow, Department of Geography, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

• Christina Röcke, University Research Priority Program (URPP) “Dynamics of Healthy Aging (DynAge)”, University of Zurich, Switzerland

• Basile Chaix, INSERM, Sorbonne Université, France

• Robert Weibel, Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Program Committee

• Malcolm Campbell, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

• Martin Dijst, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, Luxemburg

• Dustin Duncan, Columbia university, USA

• Michelle Fillekes, University of Zurich, Switzerland

• Eleftheria Giannouli, University of Basel, Switzerland

• Marco Helbich, Utrecht University, Netherlands

• Jeon-Young Kang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

• Yan Kestens, Université de Montréal, Canada

• Mei-Po Kwan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Wei Luo, Harvard Medical School, USA

• Anne Vernez Moudon, University of Washington, USA

• Martine Shareck, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada

• Ying Song, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA

• Michael Widener, University of Toronto, Canada