ANLY482 AY2016-17 T2 Group11: Project Overview

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Background

SingHealth Research focuses not only on medical sciences, but also on operational improvements. With more data collection points, thanks to the advancement in healthcare technologies, SingHealth‘s researchers are better able to make discoveries and improvements in patient care faster and more robust than before.

To add more meaning to the trove of data collected, external data is sometimes synthesized for epidemiology studies, in order to find patterns, potential causes of health and disease conditions across patient groups in Singapore.

As part of their continuing study to improve operational efficiencies in the Emergency Department, SingHealth’s goal is to have an interactive dashboard to study the relationship between environmental factors and the Emergency Department (ED) patient records, for researchers to have a better understanding on the major causes for ED admissions.

As such, the aim of this project is to synthesize the ED data provided by SingHealth with the environmental data from NEA, then visualizing the data on an interactive platform using Shiny by RStudio, to assist SingHealth in exploring the effects of environmental factors, specifically air quality and weather conditions, on Emergency Department patient admission volume and their reported symptoms.

Project Motivation

With air pollution being a leading environmental threat to public health, air quality is becoming an increasing concern by regulatory agencies like World Health Organization (WHO) and governments around the world, especially with global warming being in the limelight in recent years.

WHO air quality model illustrates that 92% of the world’s population lives in places where air quality levels exceed “WHO’s Ambient Air quality guidelines” for annual mean of particulate matter with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometres (PM2.5), which is 10 μg/m3. In 2014, Singapore has a mean PM2.5 of 18 μg/m3, which exceeds WHO guideline limits.

Particles in the air such as dust, dirt, soot, and smoke are one kind of air pollution that is known to cause health problems. One key example is extremely tiny particles that are less than 2.5 micrometers in width are known as fine particulate matter, commonly referred to as PM2.5. PM2.5 includes pollutants such as sulfate, nitrates and black carbon, which are fine enough to be inhaled deep into one’s lungs, and can affect one’s cardiovascular system, therefore presenting significant risks to human health.

Similar to many other major cities, the two main sources of air pollution in Singapore are air emissions from the industries and motor vehicles. Another evident source of air pollution is the transboundary smoke haze which is a result of the land and forest fires from our regional neighbours, which influences Singapore’s air quality specifically during the South West Monsoon period from August to October.

The following is a table showing the general health effects of the various common pollutants, extracted from National Environment Agency (NEA).

Business Problem

With such information, SingHealth will be able to gain insights on how air quality indexes affect the volume of Emergency Department patients. Aside from doing further research which stem from the team’s analysis, other actionable steps include better management of manpower allocation in the Emergency Department.

Data Source

• Meteorological Service Singapore - Daily Average Temperature & Daily Average Wind Speed
• National Environment Agency - Daily Air Quality Measurements
• SingHealth - Aggregated daily volume of ED patients, grouped by symptoms