SatHealth: A Multimodal Public Health Dataset with Satellite-based Environmental Factors

TL;DR

SatHealth is a comprehensive multimodal dataset integrating environmental, satellite, health, and social data to enhance AI-driven public health modeling and disease risk prediction.

Contribution

We created SatHealth, a novel dataset combining diverse environmental and health data, and demonstrated its utility in improving AI models for public health analysis.

Findings

Environmental data significantly improve model performance.

Models show better spatial-temporal generalizability.

Web tool facilitates data exploration and application.

Abstract

Living environments play a vital role in the prevalence and progression of diseases, and understanding their impact on patient's health status becomes increasingly crucial for developing AI models. However, due to the lack of long-term and fine-grained spatial and temporal data in public and population health studies, most existing studies fail to incorporate environmental data, limiting the models' performance and real-world application. To address this shortage, we developed SatHealth, a novel dataset combining multimodal spatiotemporal data, including environmental data, satellite images, all-disease prevalences estimated from medical claims, and social determinants of health (SDoH) indicators. We conducted experiments under two use cases with SatHealth: regional public health modeling and personal disease risk prediction. Experimental results show that living environmental information can significantly improve AI models' performance and temporal-spatial generalizability on various tasks. Finally, we deploy a web-based application to provide an exploration tool for SatHealth and one-click access to both our data and regional environmental embedding to facilitate plug-and-play utilization. SatHealth is now published with data in Ohio, and we will keep updating SatHealth to cover the other parts of the US. With the web application and published code pipeline, our work provides valuable angles and resources to include environmental data in healthcare research and establishes a foundational framework for future research in environmental health informatics.