Exploring the relationships between activity-space-based greenness exposure and birth weight among Twitter mothers

Keywords: mobility, birth, geotagged social media, greenness
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Several challenges exist in the studies for understanding the influence of maternal greenness exposure on birth outcomes. For example, mobility may lead to misclassification of residence-based exposure. Also, it could be difficult and a high cost to recruit pregnant women in cohort studies to track their activities throughout the full pregnancy. The readily available geotagged social media data provides a potential to improve the greenness exposure estimate by incorporating maternal mobility at a finer spatio-temporal scale during pregnancy. In this study, I will explore the relationships between activity-space-based greenness exposure and birth weight among Twitter mothers in Georgia, USA. To implement this, several challenges need to be addressed: 1) How to identify pregnant women or new mothers based on geotagged tweets? 2) How to measure their activity-space-based greenness exposures during each trimester of pregnancy based on the location information of the geotagged tweets? 3) How to make inference on the residence, birth date, and other birth and maternal information from the mothers’ tweets? 4) How to use the referenced information from the tweets to cross link the twitter mothers with the state birth registry and census data to obtain more demographic, socio-economic, health, and neighborhood context variables?