Participatory Urban Living for Sustainable Environments (PULSE) is a visionary project aimed at transforming public health from a reactive to a predictive system using heterogeneous data from numerous sources. It is European project funded in the frame of the H2020 programme and will last 36 months.
Working with cities of Paris, Barcelona, Birmingham, New York and Singapore, project will harvest open city data, clinical data, and data from satellites and fixed and mobile sensors and develop stratified population models of chronic disease risk and environmental exposure. Focus is on two major chronic diseases in adult populations – the respiratory disease of Asthma, and the metabolic disease of Type 2 Diabetes.
Deploying a Health in All Policies (HiAP) perspective, and a ‘whole-of-city’ model, PULSE will integrate and analyse data from the health, environment, planning and transport sectors in each city. PULSE will pioneer the development and testing of dynamic spatio-temporal health impact assessments using geocoded population-based data. PULSE will also develop simulation models of potential policy scenarios to allow decision-makers, citizens and businesses to ascertain the impact of proposed policies, and Communities of Practice and a Learning Platform to encourage the use of a HiAP approach in cities.
The project will culminate in the establishment of Public Health Observatories in each urban location. These observatories will serve as linked hubs that use knowledge-driven processes and big data to shape intersectoral public policy and service provision, support citizen health, and encourage entrepreneurship in the fields of data science and mobile health.
