Browsing by Author "Pazo, María"
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- Unpacking occupational health data in the service sector: from bayesian networking and spatial clustering to policy-makingPublication . Pazo, María; Boente, Carlos; Albuquerque, M.T.D.; Gerassis, Saki; Roque, Natália; Taboada, JavierThe health status of the service sector workforce is a significant unknown in the field of medical geography. While spatial epidemiology has made progress in predicting the relationship between human health and the environment, there are still important challenges that remain unsolved. The main issue lies in the inability to statistically determine and visually represent all spatial concepts, as there is a need to cover a wide range of service activities while also considering the impact of numerous traditional medical variables and emerging risk factors, such as those related to socioeconomic and bioclimatic factors. This study aims to address the needs of health professionals by defining, prioritizing, and visualizing multiple occupational health risk factors that contribute to the well-being of workers. To achieve this, a methodological approach based on the synergy of Bayesian machine learning and geostatistics is proposed. Extensive data from occupational health surveillance tests were collected in Spain, along with socioeconomic and bioclimatic covariates, to assess potential social and climate impacts on health. This integrated approach enabled the identification of relevant patterns related to risk factors. A three-step geostatistical modeling process, including, ordinary kriging, and clustering, was used to generate national distribution maps for several factors such as annual mean temperature, annual rainfall, spine health, limb health, cholesterol, age, and sleep quality. These maps considered four target activities—administration, finances, education, and hospitality. Remarkably, bioclimatic variables were found to contribute approximately 9% to the overall health status of workers.
- Unpacking occupational health data in the tertiary sector. From spatial clustering to bayesian decision makingPublication . Pazo, María; Boente, Carlos; Albuquerque, M.T.D.; Roque, Natália; Gerassis, Saki; Taboada, Javier; Zanini , Andrea; D'Oria, MarcoThe health status of the service sector workforce is a great unknown for medical geography. Despite the advances carried out by spatial epidemiology to predict spatial patterns of disease incidence, there are important challenges unsolved. In particular, the main issue resides in the ability to effectively simplify and visually represent the problem domain, given the need to cover very different service activities and, at the same time, consider the impact of numerous emerging risk factors such as those stemming from bioclimatic and socioeconomic variables. This article proposes a new approach that allows to consider, simplify, prioritise and visualise multiple occupational health risk factors giving rise to not healthy workers. For that, it is used a twofold approach based on an innovative synergy between Bayesian machine learning and geostatistics, to analyse up to 74.401 occupational health surveillance tests gathered between 2012-2016 in Spain. This solution allows to extract relevant patterns over those risk factors that cannot be further discriminated in the Bayesian network, such as spine or limbs observations, depicting distribution maps of key differentiating variables computed by an ordinary kriging approach.