SCC-IRG Track 2: Food Environment Dynamics (FED): Leveraging AI and Human Mobility Data to Address Disparities in Food Access and Improve Americans' Diets

Over time, the daily decisions people make about what to eat generate a significant impact on their health and longevity. Decisions about what to eat are often influenced by the resources people have available and the options they can access. However, people with limited resources often live and spend time in neighborhoods such as “food deserts” and “food swamps” with few healthy options, leading to dietary inequities. While previous research has focused on the role of food options in people’s home neighborhoods, this project will investigate how the places people spend time in throughout their daily routines influence their dietary choices by analyzing vast amounts of human mobility data collected from smartphones. In this project, mobility data will be analyzed using Artificial Intelligence to evaluate policies that equitably increase access to healthy foods and lead to improved food choices by individuals. Working with government partners in public health and urban planning and by eliciting community feedback, interventions with high potential to increase access to healthy foods will be implemented in underserved communities in Los Angeles County. The approach provides a prototype for cross-sector partners to efficiently work together to use novel data science tools to develop and compare evidence-based policies for increasing equity in healthy food access. The SCC-Food Environment Dynamics (SCCFED) project will develop foundational methods in artificial intelligence (AI) to extract insights on the influence of food environments, including causal relationships with diet-related health, from a large body of anonymized human mobility data collected from smartphones of approximately 15 million U.S. adult residents from 2019-present. Working with community partners, these insights will directly guide the design of interventions to food environments that optimally increase equitable access to healthy foods. The research team will work with two partners in policy: the Los Angeles County (LAC) Department of Public Health and the Department of Regional Planning to co-design, estimate potential impacts of, and pilot test food environment interventions in communities in LAC’s unincorporated areas. SCCFED will develop transferrable data science tools and systems science frameworks to support cross-sector partners in research and government to leverage mobility data to evaluate which interventions can create the greatest impact, representing a new paradigm for scalable, evidence-based food environment intervention policy design. New techniques extracting greater meaning from human trajectories through time and space to study causal relationships between mobility and food choices offer broader impacts on a range of future issues in public health, urban planning, and transportation management. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.