SmartAirLA Asthma Pollution Alert

Asthma Pollution Alerts notifies in real-time patients with asthma and local communities to take protective measures during high episodes of pollution associated with increased rates of asthma hospitalizations.  We will utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide prescriptive analytics to empower:

•    Patients to take self-protective measures to reduce air pollution exposure.

•    Healthcare providers and community health organizations to target interventions for asthma prevention.

•    Community advocates to campaign for measures that reduce air pollution, such as plant greenbelts, enforce air regulations, reroute traffic, and use renewable energy.

•    Government agencies to effectively enforce air pollution regulations.

We are focused on improving the health and environment of underserved children with asthma with an initial focus for Los Angeles County.  The Los Angeles County of Department Public Health (LADPH) reports that there are 60,000 underserved children with asthma, 24.9% of whom are African American, followed by Latino at 9%.  The majority of these underserved children with asthma live in households that are below 100% of the Federal Poverty Level and in toxic communities that are rated by the California Environmental Protection Agency (CALEPA) as having the State's highest pollution burden.    As a result, the incidence of childhood asthma in Los Angeles's polluted and underserved communities are at 11.5% compared to the County average of 9.0%.  

The health and social-economic consequences of asthma are enormous for low-income families as asthma is the leading cause of child hospitalization, school absenteeism, and parents missing work to care for their ailing child. LADPH reports that one-third of underserved children with asthma went to the emergency room or urgent care within the previous 12-months with 52% of children with asthma missed at least one day of school.  The average costs per hospitalization of $23,254 in Los Angeles County.

We will initially serve the Los Angeles (LA) Harbor neighborhoods of Wilmington, Carson, San Pedro, and West Long Beach, which are designated by California Assembly Bill 617 (AB617) as suffering from "disproportionate impacts of air pollution." The California Healthy Places Index ranks these communities in the State's bottom 20th percentile in the social determinants of health. CALEPA rates the area as having the State's highest pollution burden from dangerous levels of particulate matter, diesel, and toxic releases.  According to the 2018 Los Angeles County Community Health Profile:

• 49% of the residents live below 200% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) with 25% below the 100% FPL.

• 32% of the population is foreign-born, with Latinos as the largest ethnic group at 63.77%, followed by Blacks at 12.72%.

Pollution is emitted from the operations of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the 2,347 oil & gas wells and refineries, and truck traffic.

Our AI platform will:

• Equip safety-net providers and community health organizations with actionable data to reduce health risks from pollution exposure.

• Empower community advocates with the data analytics to forcefully campaign or pollution mitigation.

• Serve as a monitoring mechanism of the government interventions to improve community health and environment. 

We begin with a prototype Minimum Viable Product (MVP) alert system that correlates times series the asthma emergency department (ED) visits to nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter (PM 2.5), along with climatic conditions (temperature and humidity levels) in the LA Harbor communities.  This correlation will identify the pollution markers for the prescriptive analytics that identify the risks of asthma hospitalizations to real-time air quality monitoring data from the South Coast Air Quality Management District.   To ensure the alerts provide easily understandable, actionable and accessible data, we are partnering with community health organizations and promotoras to design the MVP alert for the use in community asthma education and outreach programs for underserved children and their families.  Together, we will target the alert system deployment for the patients with asthma who live in asthmatic hotspots, according to the US census tract.  The alert will be multilingual and available through a text-message system, smartphone application, and website.

The next phase of the prescriptive analytic development is to pinpoint in real-time the pollution sources that result in the high levels of pollution associated with increased levels of hospitalizations.   The pinpointed pollution sources include freight diesel traffic and port operations, and the oil and gas refineries in the region.  The purpose of the pollution source identification is to facilitate the implementation of targeted mitigation measures during high levels of pollution.   This includes: target tree planting to reduce pollution and urban heat, and to serve as parkland; create buffer zones between emission sources and housing, schools, and day-care centers; reroute freight trucks away from asthmatic hot spots; and deploy clean transportation and energy technologies in high pollution areas.   The alerts will also be shared to the California Air Resources Board and the South Coast Air Quality Management District to step-up its air quality enforcement during the episodes of high pollution.