Developing an Approach for Generating a Spatial Urban Health Equity Map and Validating via Volunteered Geographic Information

Abstract

Spatial urban health equity assessment is of vital importance, relating closely to quality of life standards and level of urban development. Generally, spatial health equity can be assessed according to spatial accessibility to health care and medical centers (HCMCs), green spaces, public transportation stations and main roads. The density and distribution of HCMCs are also important factors in spatial health equity assessment and air pollution level can also affect the health of citizens. This paper aims to model the spatial urban health equity map by aggregating all these criteria using reference data. Then, it compares the health equity map generated from reference data to one generated by volunteered geographic information (VGI) by citizens. The main contributions of this paper include i) aggregating spatial accessibility criteria, density and distribution of HCMCs and air pollution levels, based on the Mamdani fuzzy inference system (FIS), ii) comparing the spatial equity map with a health equity map achieved using VGI. Health equity status of citizens was categorized into five levels from ‘very appropriate’ to ‘very inappropriate’ and collected by citizens using a VGI website. The proposed method was implemented in District 6 of Tehran, Iran. Our findings showed for the resulting map with the reference data that almost 62% of the study area, was reported as ‘appropriate or ‘very appropriate’, 20% as ‘good’ and about 18% as ‘inappropriate’ or ‘very inappropriate’. The collected VGI from citizens achieved results with 72% compatibility. Furthermore, according to the precision, recall and F-score measures, most accuracy was attributed to the ‘appropriate’ level of spatial health equity and the least accuracy to the ‘very inappropriate’ level.