Travel patterns during pregnancy: comparison between Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking and questionnaire data

Abstract

BackgroundMaternal exposures to traffic-related air pollution have been associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes. Exposures to traffic-related air pollutants are strongly influenced by time spent near traffic. However, little is known about women’s travel activities during pregnancy and whether questionnaire-based data can provide reliable information on travel patterns during pregnancy.ObjectivesExamine women’s in-vehicle travel behavior during pregnancy and examine the difference in travel data collected by questionnaire and global positioning system (GPS) and their potential for exposure error.MethodsWe measured work-related travel patterns in 56 pregnant women using a questionnaire and one-week GPS tracking three times during pregnancy (<20 weeks, 20–30 weeks, and >30 weeks of gestation). We compared self-reported activities with GPS-derived trip distance and duration, and examined potentially influential factors that may contribute to differences. We also described in-vehicle travel behavior by pregnancy periods and influences of demographic and personal factors on daily travel times. Finally, we estimated personal exposure to particle-bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PB-PAH) and examined the magnitude of exposure misclassification using self-reported vs. GPS travel data.ResultsSubjects overestimated both trip duration and trip distance compared to the GPS data. We observed moderately high correlations between self-reported and GPS-recorded travel distance (home to work trips: r = 0.88; work to home trips: r = 0.80). Better agreement was observed between the GPS and the self-reported travel time for home to work trips (r = 0.77) than work to home trips (r = 0.64). The subjects on average spent 69 and 93 minutes traveling in vehicles daily based on the GPS and self-reported data, respectively. Longer daily travel time was observed among participants in early pregnancy, and during certain pregnancy periods in women with higher education attainment, higher income, and no children. When comparing self-reported vs. GPS data, we found that estimated personal exposure to PB-PAH did not differ remarkably at the population level, but the difference was large at an individual level.ConclusionSelf-reported home-to-work data overestimated both trip duration and trip distance compared to GPS data. Significant differences in PAH exposure estimates were observed at individual level using self-reported vs. GPS data, which has important implications in air pollution epidemiological studies.

Applications of Space Technologies to Global Health: Scoping Review

“…In addition to PA, the built and natural environment were studied for their associations with NCDs. Researched environmental determinants of health ranged from air pollution [ 291 , 251 ] and water quality monitoring [ 246 , 241 ] to the complex ways in which climate change impacts global health [ 259 ]. For this purpose, researchers used GNSS and satellite imagery in a variety of ways.…”

Travel in Pregnancy: The Impact of Zika

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Impact of Exposure Uncertainty on the Association between Perfluorooctanoate and Preeclampsia in the C8 Health Project Population

“…Retrospective fate and transport model estimates may be particularly prone to inaccuracies, and integrating multiple models in the process of an exposure assessment can result in structural uncertainty, whereby uncertainty in one model gets propagated through the following models and can contribute more to the overall uncertainty than all of the individual uncertainties combined ( Özkaynak et al 2008 ). The use of surrogates for pollutant-level and participant-level spatiotemporal input data, such as modeled pollutant concentrations, self-reported activity patterns, or only one exposure biomarker per participant in certain situations, can be viewed as a type of exposure measurement error in the assessment ( Bartell et al 2004 ; Sarnat et al 2010 ; Shin et al 2014 ; Tsuchiya et al 2012 ; Wu et al 2013 ).…”