Improving Food Access: Using Agent Based Simulation
Abstract ID: I321
Abstract
A steady increase in number of cases for chronic diseases like type-2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and some cancers has been one of the biggest problems in healthcare. One of the main reasons for this is not maintaining adequate consumption of healthy and high quality food. Access to healthy food is critical public-health concern and consequently there is an increasing interest in mapping the food environment and identifying food deserts (areas where people have significantly limited access to retail sources of healthy, nutritious and affordable food). This study is a step towards that goal. We use agent based simulation to simulate the impact …show more content…
We use the household and geographic data from US Census and results of public surveys conducted by USDA. We conclude by presenting some methods for verifications of the model.
Keywords
Food Desert, Agent Based Simulation, Food Access, USDA, Goodness of Fit Test
1. Introduction
The concept of Food desert has been well established by different researchers in a lot of different ways. In general we define food desert as an area where affordable healthy food is difficult to obtain, particularly for those with lower income or for those without access to an automobile [1]. USDA defines Food deserts as “Parts of the country vapid of fresh fruits, and other healthful whole foods, usually found in impoverished areas”. Food desert is not limited to rural areas, Urban residents lacking spatial and economic access to healthy foods, are also at risk of having diets with poor nutrition, which in turn …show more content…
We use US Census Beuro website [19] for the information of block groups, there exists 27 block within the state college area. This information is downloaded in Shapefile format, we use maptools [20] a package of R to extract the boundary information of Block groups. We also need total number of households in a given block group to categorize them in different household types. Finally, we use American Fact Finder Website [21] to get the detail information for each block group. It shows that the distribution of the household number of a block group is quite huge. The total number of household is 12610, but the range is from 0 to 1132 within these 27 block groups. This information is then plotted as shown in Fig.4 using ggmap [22]
Abstract ID: I321
Abstract
A steady increase in number of cases for chronic diseases like type-2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and some cancers has been one of the biggest problems in healthcare. One of the main reasons for this is not maintaining adequate consumption of healthy and high quality food. Access to healthy food is critical public-health concern and consequently there is an increasing interest in mapping the food environment and identifying food deserts (areas where people have significantly limited access to retail sources of healthy, nutritious and affordable food). This study is a step towards that goal. We use agent based simulation to simulate the impact …show more content…
We use the household and geographic data from US Census and results of public surveys conducted by USDA. We conclude by presenting some methods for verifications of the model.
Keywords
Food Desert, Agent Based Simulation, Food Access, USDA, Goodness of Fit Test
1. Introduction
The concept of Food desert has been well established by different researchers in a lot of different ways. In general we define food desert as an area where affordable healthy food is difficult to obtain, particularly for those with lower income or for those without access to an automobile [1]. USDA defines Food deserts as “Parts of the country vapid of fresh fruits, and other healthful whole foods, usually found in impoverished areas”. Food desert is not limited to rural areas, Urban residents lacking spatial and economic access to healthy foods, are also at risk of having diets with poor nutrition, which in turn …show more content…
We use US Census Beuro website [19] for the information of block groups, there exists 27 block within the state college area. This information is downloaded in Shapefile format, we use maptools [20] a package of R to extract the boundary information of Block groups. We also need total number of households in a given block group to categorize them in different household types. Finally, we use American Fact Finder Website [21] to get the detail information for each block group. It shows that the distribution of the household number of a block group is quite huge. The total number of household is 12610, but the range is from 0 to 1132 within these 27 block groups. This information is then plotted as shown in Fig.4 using ggmap [22]