Demographic Associations with GPS-Inferred Routine Activity Spaces: Data from the Everyday Environments and Experiences (E3) Study

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Abstract

People in mid-life interact with several different environments during their daily life in-cluding employment, leisure, commuting, and various family responsibilities, a concept defined as activity space. However, little is known about how these activity spaces contrib-ute to individuals’ daily health behavior choices. The Everyday Environments and Expe-riences (E3) study was conducted to explore these relationships. In this paper, we provide a reproducible GPS processing workflow to generate time-weighted exposure measures (activity spaces) inferred from 21 days of continuous GPS monitoring among 340 mid-life adults in Cook County, Illinois (N=340) from the E3 study. Data from waist-mounted GPS devices that recorded one-minute location epochs were aggregated after excluding time spent within an 800-meter buffer around the home. For each epoch, we derived proximity and kernel density measures for eleven food and physical-activity-related location types (e.g., supermarkets, fitness facilities), along with twenty-six environmental context varia-bles (e.g., land use, crime, population density). Time-weighted averages characterized each participant’s typical non-home environmental exposure. After adjustment for envi-ronmental context, age and gender were generally unrelated to activity-space measures. However, Black and Hispanic participants (as compared to White participants) spent less time near both food and physical-activity resources, suggesting systemic inequities in ac-cess beyond neighborhood composition.

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