Healthcare Recommender System Based on Medical Specialties, Patient Profiles, and Geospatial Information

The global outburst of COVID-19 introduced severe issues concerning the capacity and adoption of healthcare systems and how vulnerable citizen classes might be affected. The pandemic generated the most remarkable transformation of health services, appropriating the increase in new information and communication technologies to bring sustainability to health services. This paper proposes a novel, methodological, and collaborative approach based on patient-centered technology, which consists of a recommender system architecture to assist the health service level according to medical specialties. The system provides recommendations according to the user profile of the citizens and a ranked list of medical facilities. Thus, we propose a health attention factor to semantically compute the similarity between medical specialties and offer medical centers with response capacity, health service type, and close user geographic location. Thus, considering the challenges described in the state-of-the-art, this approach tackles issues related to recommenders in mobile devices and the diversity of items in the healthcare domain, incorporating semantic and geospatial processing. The recommender system was tested in diverse districts of Mexico City, and the spatial visualization of the medical facilities filtering by the recommendations is displayed in a Web-GIS application. © 2022 by the authors.

Air pollution and mobility in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area in times of COVID-19

This paper analyzes the relation between COVID-19, air pollution, and public transport mobility in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA). We test if the restrictions to economic activity introduced to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 are associated with a structural change in air pollution levels and public transport mobility. Our results show that mobility in public transportation was significantly reduced following the government's recommendations. Nonetheless, we show that the reduction in mobility was not accompanied by a reduction in air pollution. Furthermore, Granger-causality tests show that the precedence relation between public transport mobility and air pollution disappeared as a product of the restrictions. Thus, our results suggest that air pollution in the MCMA seems primarily driven by industry and private car usage. In this regard, the government should redouble its efforts to develop policies to reduce industrial pollution and private car usage. © 2023 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Ciencias de la Atmósfera y Cambio Climático. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).