EpiMob: Interactive Visual Analytics of Citywide Human Mobility Restrictions for Epidemic Control

TL;DR

EpiMob is an interactive visual analytics system that simulates and compares the effects of various citywide human mobility restrictions on epidemic spread, aiding policymakers in evaluating control strategies during outbreaks like COVID-19.

Contribution

This study introduces EpiMob, a novel big data-driven visual analytics tool that enables dynamic simulation and comparison of mobility restriction policies for epidemic control.

Findings

EpiMob effectively visualizes the impact of policies on infection spread.

Case studies in Tokyo demonstrate its practical utility for policymakers.

The system supports flexible policy design and analysis.

Abstract

The outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has swept across more than 180 countries and territories since late January 2020. As a worldwide emergency response, governments have implemented various measures and policies, such as self-quarantine, travel restrictions, work from home, and regional lockdown, to control the spread of the epidemic. These countermeasures seek to restrict human mobility because COVID-19 is a highly contagious disease that is spread by human-to-human transmission. Medical experts and policymakers have expressed the urgency to effectively evaluate the outcome of human restriction policies with the aid of big data and information technology. Thus, based on big human mobility data and city POI data, an interactive visual analytics system called Epidemic Mobility (EpiMob) was designed in this study. The system interactively simulates the changes in human mobility and infection status in response to the implementation of a certain restriction policy or a combination of policies (e.g., regional lockdown, telecommuting, screening). Users can conveniently designate the spatial and temporal ranges for different mobility restriction policies. Then, the results reflecting the infection situation under different policies are dynamically displayed and can be flexibly compared and analyzed in depth. Multiple case studies consisting of interviews with domain experts were conducted in the largest metropolitan area of Japan (i.e., Greater Tokyo Area) to demonstrate that the system can provide insight into the effects of different human mobility restriction policies for epidemic control, through measurements and comparisons.