Behavioral-network determinants of health outcomes.

Our behavior conditions our health. Exposure to infections depends on our and other people’s mobility. Exposure to healthy environments or habits depends on our choices and opportunities. Although human behavior is highly adaptive and dynamic, most social determinants of health are restricted to static aggregated representations of socio-demographic groups or residential environments.

We have started a program to understand behavioral-network determinants of health outcomes by modeling physical exposure between people and environments using large datasets of human mobility and activity and multilayer networks. For example, using mobility data and state-of-the-art epidemiological models, we built high-resolution temporal contact networks at the population scale. Having a direct link to human behavior allowed us to model and predict potential behavioral interventions (closing of venues, re-opening, quarantine, contact tracing) or the role of super-spreading events and settings in the propagation of the virus , or even analyze future trade-offs between the epidemic and economic dimensions of the pandemic. People’s movements also condition the food environments they are exposed to, impacting their diet and related disease. Most of the focus has been on static food environments around the home, such as food deserts. We use large datasets of human mobility and causal techniques to detect the food environments people are exposed to and food outlets they visit as they move through the day and study the time-dependent effect of food environments on more healthy dietary choices. By incorporating the intertwined effect between mobility, human behavior, and exposure to food environments, we can build more efficient interventions to promote healthier options and diets.

Recent papers

• Effect of mobile food environments on fast food visits
  What is the influence of the places we visit/work/shop on our dietary choices? We find that effect is large, but not everybody is affected by the environment equally. As a result we can design better policies to change environments and increase consumption of healthy food among different socio-demographic groups
  Bernardo Garcia-Bulle, Abigail L Horn, Brooke M Bell, Mohsen Bahrami, Burcin Bozkaya, Alex Pentland, Kayla de la Haye, Esteban Moro
  Nature Communications 15 2291 (2024)
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• Population mobility data provides meaningful indicators of fast food intake and diet-related diseases in diverse populations
  We use mobility data to investigate if visits to fast-food places can be use to get better understanding of who consume fast food in urban areas. We find that mobility data is a better predictor of diet-related diseases in communities than traditional surveys.
  Abigail L. Horn, Brooke M. Bell, Bernardo Garcia Bulle Bueno, Mohsen Bahrami, Burcin Bozkaya, Yan Cui, John P. Wilson, Alex Pentland, Esteban Moro, Kayla de la Haye
  NPJ Digital Medicine 6 208 (2023)
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• Quantifying the importance and location of SARS-CoV-2 transmission events in large metropolitan areas
  Using massive mobility data and high-resolution contact matrices we investigate who, when, and where was infected by COVID-19 in major urban areas in the US. We find that infection paths where very different across cities and that super-spreading events were prevalent but not important to explain the majority of infections
  Alberto Aleta, David Martin-Corral, Michiel A. Bakker, Ana Pastore y Piontti, Marco Ajelli, Maria Litvinova, Matteo Chinazzi, Natalie E. Dean, M. Elizabeth Halloran, Ira M. Longini, Alex Pentland, Alessandro Vespignani, Yamir Moreno, Esteban Moro
  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 e2112182119 (2022)
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• Effect of COVID-19 response policies on walking behavior in US cities
  Ruth F. Hunter, Leandro Garcia, Thiago Herick de Sa, Belen Zapata-Diomedi, Christopher Millett, James Woodcock, Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, Esteban Moro
  Nature Communications 12 3652 (2021)
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• Modelling the impact of testing, contact tracing and household quarantine on second waves of COVID-19
  Alberto Aleta, David Martin-Corral, Ana Pastore y Piontti, Marco Ajelli, Maria Litvinova, Matteo Chinazzi, Natalie E. Dean, M. Elizabeth Halloran, Ira M. Longini Jr, Stefano Merler, Alex Pentland, Alessandro Vespignani, Esteban Moro, Yamir Moreno
  Nature Human Behaviour 4 964–971 (2020)
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