Video: Using Google Street View Images To Examine Links Between and Built Environment and Health

"Using Google Street View Images to Examine Links Between the Built Environment and Health" was delivered by Quynh Nguyen, assistant professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, as the first lecture in the 2020 National Library of Medicine (NLM) Informatics and Data Science Lecture Series.

Nguyen explains how advances in neighborhood research have been constrained by the lack of neighborhood data for many geographical areas. She discusses the use of Google Street View (GSV) images as a source of national data on built environment features and the use of computer vision to label images for indicators of walkability, urban development, and physical disorder. Nguyen also presents preliminary analyses examining associations between built environment features and health outcomes at the census tract and county levels.

Nguyen is a social epidemiologist focusing on contextual and economic factors as they relate to health. She has extensive experience using numerous national and international population-based health surveys to examine social and economic predictors of health, and to quantify national and international patterns in health disparities. Her current research program focuses on creating and validating neighborhood indicators constructed from nontraditional Big Data sources such as social media data and GSV images. In the lecture, she discusses how they collect images and how they identify relevant built environment features from street images. 

This lecture is sponsored by Valerie Florance, Ph.D., Associate Director of the National Library of Medicine, Division of Extramural Programs.