Optimizing behavioral interventions Using Mobility Patterns

This research quantifies and visualizes the changes in geographical mobility patterns before/during/after lockdowns at various scales, and investigates how these changes affect the lives of vulnerable populations and the spread of coronavirus.

Leila Hedayatifar, Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at New England Complex Systems Institute

Many people are suffering from the multiple surges in the coronavirus outbreak since 2020. While large-scale lockdown policies, besides individual-level policies, have been successful at limiting the outbreak in a short time, over long periods, they can cause huge economic costs if they are not applied optimally. So, governments have continuously relaxed restrictions not long after observing improvements in containment. But premature eases in restrictions have led to surges of the pandemic again. This is a national and global problem due to the multi-scale nature of social connectivity. In most cases, lockdown policies, analysis and data collections related to the COVID-19 outbreak have been based on arbitrary borders such as state/province or county borders. While these boundaries may serve constituents well in meeting certain social needs, this is not the most effective way for countries to apply policies to control the pandemic on large scales. This study addresses this challenge by carefully studying geographical mobility patterns before/during/after COVID-19 outbreaks in the US, and defines the borders of connected areas at various scales. By calculating the correlations among social deprivation indices and mobility patches, the findings quantify the effects of the pandemic on people’s lives.

Due to data limitations, our current analysis is in the scale of US country. However, it has the potential to be applied to other areas and countries. We will investigate the patterns all over the US. So our findings will serve all the US residents and especially the vulnerable segments of the populations. We will share our website and analysis publicly. It will allow people to have a clearer picture of the up-to-date situation of an outbreak and where is safe/unsafe for them to go/not to go. It also helps policymakers for developing more optimal policies and lockdowns that match better with the local situation of an outbreak and its compatibility with the living difficulties of residents. To engage policymakers and individuals to use our findings we have made a website and a large group audience in Twitter, Slack, Linkedin, and other media. The researchers of our group have also actively presented the results in news interviews, scientific meetings, and conferences. 

We will share our analysis, data collection and visualizations publicly on a website. Interactive multi-scale dynamical maps and analysis dashboard allow policymakers and people to trace the changes in the mobility patterns before/during/after outbreaks. A better knowledge about the risk exposure of an outbreak in mobility patches allow individuals to better assess their situation during a pandemic and better protect themselves from being in high infection risk. Individual level awareness can affect the collective behavior of the system and help reduce the strength of a pandemic at larger scales. 

More optimized and localized lockdown policies will less suffer people and businesses over a long period of time. Our research studies the effects of current experienced strategies on lives and mobility patterns of vulnerable populations and defines which segments more suffer from lockdowns during an outbreak. Findings will allow policymakers to be more aware about the consequences of their decisions. 

We already started disseminating ideas about social fragmentation by scaling up. Specifically, we are currently focusing on exploring the role of social fragmentation in various industries and services. We are also scaling deep, by developing strategies towards a mind-shift in public health and policy making. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we started EndCoronavirus project, in which we recruited thousands of volunteers, by means of which we are sharing knowledge of how to effectively optimize the lockdowns, and minimize the spread of COVID-19. Our project was featured in a number of national newspapers. We organized public debates and influenced policy makers in a number of countries. We are also looking at scaling out strategies to make our impact transferable. We invest our time in training and teaching others to implement our solution or aspects of it through courses, workshops or seminars. In the future, we plan to scale up by forming joint venture partnerships with other visualization companies, policy makers, and public health officials. The ultimate goal for us is the US government adoption.

We are measuring our success at multiple levels in social media and the real world. In social media we are monitoring audience growth rate, post reach, social share of voice, applause rate, average engagement rate, amplification rate, virality rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, cost-per-click, comment conversation rate, and some others. Our tweets gain thousands of views on @endCOVID19 and @yaneerbaryam accounts, as well as posting on LinkedIn, and ResearchGate accounts. Our viral tweets reach thousands of social media users. @endCOVID19 has 12.5K followers and @yaneerbaryam has 65.3K followers. Besides this, we have a large user base on our endcoronavirus.org website. Thousands of volunteers have signed up at our website during the past year. We manage communication with volunteers on Slack. Impact on economics and COVID-19 spread, we are estimating by simulation models

Financial support is the most important need for our project. We partially funded by a NSF grant last year that will be due on June 2021. Also, last year, SafeGraph gave us the mobility data for free. But from April 2021, we must buy the data which will be around $100,000.00.

We are affiliated with endcoronavirus.org which is a volunteer organization spearheaded by the New England Complex Systems Institute.

The most important point to apply for the Trinity Challenge, besides the possibility of getting funded, is the opportunity to be partner with excellent members of the Trinity challenge.

We need support for data gathering and marketing and interested to partner with: Google, Facebook, Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Discovery, Cuebiq, Clinton Health Access Initiative, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, The Behavioural Insights Team,