Using Individual GPS Trajectories to Explore Foodscape Exposure: A Case Study in Beijing Metropolitan Area

With the growing interest in studying the characteristics of people’s access to the food environment and its influence upon individual health, there has been a focus on assessing individual food exposure based on GPS trajectories. However, existing studies have largely focused on the overall activity space using short-period trajectories, which ignores the complexity of human movements and the heterogeneity of the spaces that are experienced by the individual over daily life schedules. In this study, we propose a novel framework to extract the exposure areas consisting of the localized activity spaces around daily life centers and non-motorized commuting routes from long-term GPS trajectories. The newly proposed framework is individual-specific and can incorporate the internal heterogeneity of individual activities (spatial extent, stay duration, and timing) in different places as well as the dynamics of the context. A pilot study of the GeoLife dataset suggests that there are significant variations in the magnitude as well as the composition of the food environment in different parts of the individual exposure area, and residential environment is not representative of the overall foodscape exposure.