Quantifying neighborhood health: Using mobile technology to empower the public

The Sustainable Communities Index (SCI), a system of over 100 performance measures for livable, equitable and prosperous cities, was developed in 2007 by the San Francisco Department of Public Health's Program on Health, Equity and Sustainability (PHES). With increasing usage of mobile devices to access health information, PHES initiated a project to develop a mobile application that calculates a “neighborhood score” derived from SCI data. The purpose of the app would be to provide users a relative score of the immediate neighborhood surrounding their location in San Francisco that is based on a holistic model of health and sustainability; encompassing environment, transportation, community, public realm, education, housing and economy. The app could be used to assess the livability of a neighborhood and inform decisions about whether to rent or buy in certain areas, similar to services like Walk Score. Collaborating with Appalicious, a mobile application developer, PHES selected 20 SCI indicators to pilot with the mobile app and aggregated each indicator to quarter mile grid squares for the whole city. Scores were derived for each indicator based on their relative distribution. An overall score was calculated for each quarter mile grid square and a heat map created for display on a mobile device. The final product is the Neighborhood Score app and would be demonstrated to illustrate functionality. With the increasing use of mobile technology, PHES seeks new approaches of displaying and sharing data to increase awareness of the connections between the environment and health and inform better decision making.