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Show HARMONIZATION OF SENSOR MEASUREMENTS TO SUPPORT HEALTH RESEARCH Nicole Burnett (Ramkiran Gouripeddi) Department of Biomedical Informatics, Department of Chemical Engineering and Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences Background The Salt Lake Valley has three permanent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) certified air quality (AQ) monitoring stations that intake air samples and produce results of AQ in the proximity of the monitor station. Due to the fact that the monitors only represent a small area of the 500-square-mile Salt Lake Valley, there are spatial and temporal gaps when using the AQ monitoring data for epidemiological studies. Researchers and Salt Lake Valley residents are recording AQ data measurements from their individual sensors. Integrating these AQ collections with those from EPA could provide a comprehensive grid of AQ measurements. But each of these AQ monitors and sensors have different data representations and associated metadata. With the help of my team, I developed a conceptual data model that harmonizes and stores metadata and measurements from different AQ sensors. This way researchers could systematically utilize vast amounts of AQ data to support their studies. Research Methodology We followed a four step process (Figure 1). Figure 1: Four step specifications development process We performed a literature review using PubMed with the search criterion “Pediatric Asthma Sensor Studies’. This returned 231 journal articles. We found 40 of these to be relevant and read their full texts. We manually extracted a list of metadata elements describing AQ sensors from the literature, and developed a first draft of a conceptual data model. Next I helped my team collect sample data from different AQ sources across the Salt Lake Valley. With the data that was collected, I evaluated the conceptual model. Sample data included data from: 1. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 2. Utah Department of Air Quality (UDAQ) 3. MesoWest (http://synopticlabs.org/) 4. Air Toxics Study: Study funded by the EPA and being performed in West Valley, Salt Lake County by Dr. Munkh Baasandorj, UDAQ 5. Asthma Triggers Study: Performed by Dr. Rima Habre, University of Southern California (USC) 6. Wood Burning Study: Performed by Dr. Kerry E. Kelly, University of Utah (UU) 7. PurpleAir: Citizens AQ network managed by Mr. Adrian Dybwad, http://www.purpleair.org/ |
