Mobility evaluation by GPS tracking in a rural, low-income population in Cambodia

Anaïs Pepey (1) , Thomas Obadia (2, 3) , Saorin Kim (1) , Siv Sovannaroth (4) , Ivo Mueller (5) , Benoit Witkowski (1) , Amélie Vantaux (1) , Marc Souris (6)

1 Institut Pasteur du Cambodge
2 Hub Bioinformatique et Biostatistique - Bioinformatics and Biostatistics HUB
3 Epidémiologie et Analyse des Maladies Infectieuses - Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Analytics
4 CNM - National Center for Parasitology, Entomology and Malaria Control [Phnom Penh, Cambodia]
5 University of Melbourne
6 UVE - Unité des Virus Emergents

Global Positioning System (GPS) technology is an effective tool for quantifying individuals’ mobility patterns and can be used to understand their influence on infectious disease transmission. In Cambodia, mobility measurements have been limited to questionnaires, which are of limited efficacy in rural environments. In this study, we used GPS tracking to measure the daily mobility of Cambodian forest goers, a population at high risk of malaria, and developed a workflow adapted to local constraints to produce an optimal dataset representative of the participants’ mobility. We provide a detailed assessment of the GPS tracking and analysis of the data, and highlight the associated difficulties to facilitate the implementation of similar studies in the future.

Domaines: Santé publique et épidémiologie

Anaïs Pepey, Thomas Obadia, Saorin Kim, Siv Sovannaroth, Ivo Mueller, et al.. Mobility evaluation by GPS tracking in a rural, low-income population in Cambodia. PLoS ONE, 2022, 17 (5), pp.e0266460. ⟨10.1371/journal.pone.0266460⟩. ⟨pasteur-03669329⟩