A Construction of Geographical Distance-based Air Quality Dataset Using Hospital Location Information

Abstract

As of late, air quality information has been actively gathered and investigated in order to find possible environmental risk factors that may affect the onset of cardiovascular disease. Nevertheless, existing studies are limited in the detailed analysis because they take advantage of the air quality information of the macro statistics divided into administrative districts. This paper proposes the construction of distance-based air quality dataset using a domestic hospital's geographical location information as a reliable data gathering step for a more detailed analysis of environmental risk factors. For the construction of the dataset, air quality information was obtained by utilizing the geographical location of a hospital-in which a patient with cardiovascular disease had been admitted-and then matching the hospital with a meteorological and air pollution station in its vicinity. An air quality acquisition system based on GMap.net was devised for the purpose of data gathering and visualization. The reliability of the experiment was confirmed by evaluating the matching rate and error of air quality values between the acquired dataset with existing area-based air quality datasets from matched distances. Therefore, this dataset, which considers geographical information, can be utilized in multidisciplinary research for the discovery of environmental risk factors that can affect not only cardiovascular diseases but also potentially other epidemic diseases. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.