The electric power sector is a leading source of air pollutant emissions, impacting the public health of nearly every community. Although regulatory measures have reduced air pollutants, fossil fuels remain a significant component of the energy supply, highlighting the need for more advanced demand-side approaches to reduce the public health impacts. To enable health-informed demand-side management, we introduce HealthPredictor, a domain-specific AI model that provides an end-to-end pipeline linking electricity use to public health outcomes. The model comprises three components: a fuel mix predictor that estimates the contribution of different generation sources, an air quality converter that models pollutant emissions and atmospheric dispersion, and a health impact assessor that translates resulting pollutant changes into monetized health damages. Across multiple regions in the United States, our health-driven optimization framework yields substantially lower prediction errors in terms of public health impacts than fuel mix-driven baselines. A case study on electric vehicle charging schedules illustrates the public health gains enabled by our method and the actionable guidance it
The surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI) has led to a rapid expansion of energy-intensive data centers, contributing to criteria air pollutant emissions and raising public health concerns that have received comparatively limited attention in sustainability assessments. This paper introduces a principled methodology to model air pollutant emissions for data centers and estimate the public health impacts. Our findings reveal that the growing demand for AI and computing technologies is projected to push the total annual public health burden of U.S. data centers up to more than $20 billion in 2028. Although national-level impacts remain modest, data center health costs are unevenly distributed: in the most affected counties, the estimated per-household health burden can reach about seven times the national average. Next, we propose a health-informed computing framework that explicitly incorporates public health impacts into data center resource management across space and time, mitigating public health costs while supporting environmental sustainability. More broadly, we recommend extended energy reporting to include public health impact of data centers and paying attention
Rapidly evolving technology, data and analytic landscapes are permeating many fields and professions. In public health, the need for data science skills including data literacy is particularly prominent given both the potential of novel data types and analysis methods to fill gaps in existing public health research and intervention practices, as well as the potential of such data or methods to perpetuate or augment health disparities. Through a review of public health courses and programs at the top 10 U.S. and globally ranked schools of public health, this article summarizes existing educational efforts in public health data science. These existing practices serve to inform efforts for broadening such curricula to further schools and populations. Data science ethics course offerings are also examined in context of assessing how population health principles can be blended into training across levels of data involvement to augment the traditional core of public health curricula. Parallel findings from domestic and international 'outside the classroom' training programs are also synthesized to advance approaches for increasing diversity in public health data science. Based on these p
Nutritional interventions are important for managing chronic health conditions, but current computational methods provide limited support for personalized dietary guidance. We identify three key gaps: (1) dietary pattern studies often ignore real-world constraints such as socioeconomic status, comorbidities, and limited food access; (2) recommendation systems rarely explain why a particular food helps a given patient; and (3) no unified benchmark evaluates methods across the connected tasks needed for nutritional interventions. We introduce GLEN-Bench, the first comprehensive graph-language based benchmark for nutritional health assessment. We combine NHANES health records, FNDDS food composition data, and USDA food-access metrics to build a knowledge graph that links demographics, health conditions, dietary behaviors, poverty-related constraints, and nutrient needs. We test the benchmark using opioid use disorder, where models must detect subtle nutritional differences across disease stages. GLEN-Bench includes three linked tasks: risk detection identifies at-risk individuals from dietary and socioeconomic patterns; recommendation suggests personalized foods that meet clinical nee
Diet plays a critical role in human health, yet tailoring dietary reasoning to individual health conditions remains a major challenge. Nutrition Question Answering (QA) has emerged as a popular method for addressing this problem. However, current research faces two critical limitations. On one hand, the absence of datasets involving user-specific medical information severely limits \textit{personalization}. This challenge is further compounded by the wide variability in individual health needs. On the other hand, while large language models (LLMs), a popular solution for this task, demonstrate strong reasoning abilities, they struggle with the domain-specific complexities of personalized healthy dietary reasoning, and existing benchmarks fail to capture these challenges. To address these gaps, we introduce the Nutritional Graph Question Answering (NGQA) benchmark, the first graph question answering dataset designed for personalized nutritional health reasoning. NGQA leverages data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and the Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies (FNDDS) to evaluate whether a food is healthy for a specific user, supported by ex
We present a technical case study on the Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) for Public Health Challenge, a collaborative effort to safely leverage sensitive private sector data for social impact, specifically pandemic management. The project utilized Differential Privacy (DP) to create realistic, privacy-preserved synthetic financial transaction data, which was then combined with public health and mobility datasets. This approach successfully addressed the critical hurdle of sharing sensitive financial information for research and policy. The analysis demonstrated that this synthetic, DP-protected data possesses significant spatial-temporal and predictive power for public health. Key outcomes include the development of six reusable tools and frameworks supporting diagnostic nowcasting (e.g., Hotspot Detection, Pandemic Adherence Monitoring) and predictive forecasting (e.g., Mobility Analysis, Contact Matrix Estimation) for epidemiological decision-making. The study provides best practices for advancing data sharing in a privacy-compliant manner.
This study explores how the COVID-19 pandemic's economic impact has exacerbated nutritional health disparities among women. It sought to understand the effects of economic challenges on women's dietary choices and access to nutritious food across different socioeconomic groups. Using a mixed-methods approach, the research combined quantitative data from health and economic records with qualitative insights from interviews with diverse women. The study analyzed trends in nutritional health and economic factors before and after the pandemic and gathered personal accounts regarding nutrition and economic difficulties during this period. Findings showed a clear link between the economic downturn and deteriorating nutritional health, particularly in low-income and marginalized groups. These women reported decreased access to healthy foods and an increased dependence on less nutritious options due to budget constraints, leading to a decline in dietary quality. This trend was less evident in higher-income groups, highlighting stark disparities. The pandemic intensified pre-existing nutritional inequalities, with the most vulnerable groups facing greater adverse effects. However, community
Time elapsed till an event of interest is often modeled using the survival analysis methodology, which estimates a survival score based on the input features. There is a resurgence of interest in developing more accurate prediction models for time-to-event prediction in personalized healthcare using modern tools such as neural networks. Higher quality features and more frequent observations improve the predictions for a patient, however, the impact of including a patient's geographic location-based public health statistics on individual predictions has not been studied. This paper proposes a complementary improvement to survival analysis models by incorporating public health statistics in the input features. We show that including geographic location-based public health information results in a statistically significant improvement in the concordance index evaluated on the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) dataset containing nationwide cancer incidence data. The improvement holds for both the standard Cox proportional hazards model and the state-of-the-art Deep Survival Machines model. Our results indicate the utility of geographic location-based public health feat
For a long time, public health events, such as disease incidence or vaccination activity, have been monitored to keep track of the health status of the population, allowing to evaluate the effect of public health initiatives and to decide where resources for improving public health are best spent. This thesis investigates the use of web data mining for public health monitoring, and makes contributions in the following two areas: New approaches for predicting public health events from web mined data, and novel applications of web mined data for public health monitoring.
Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise in addressing complex medical problems. However, while most prior studies focus on improving accuracy and reasoning abilities, a significant bottleneck in developing effective healthcare agents lies in the readability of LLM-generated responses, specifically, their ability to answer public health problems clearly and simply to people without medical backgrounds. In this work, we introduce RephQA, a benchmark for evaluating the readability of LLMs in public health question answering (QA). It contains 533 expert-reviewed QA pairs from 27 sources across 13 topics, and includes a proxy multiple-choice task to assess informativeness, along with two readability metrics: Flesch-Kincaid grade level and professional score. Evaluation of 25 LLMs reveals that most fail to meet readability standards, highlighting a gap between reasoning and effective communication. To address this, we explore four readability-enhancing strategies-standard prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), and a token-adapted variant. Token-adapted GRPO achieves the best results, advancing the development of more practical and user-friendl
In healthcare, artificial intelligence (AI) has been changing the way doctors and health experts take care of people. This paper will cover how AI is making major changes in the health care system, especially with nutrition. Various machine learning and deep learning algorithms have been developed to extract valuable information from healthcare data which help doctors, nutritionists, and health experts to make better decisions and make our lifestyle healthy. This paper provides an overview of the current state of AI applications in healthcare with a focus on the utilization of AI-driven recommender systems in nutrition. It will discuss the positive outcomes and challenges that arise when AI is used in this field. This paper addresses the challenges to develop AI recommender systems in healthcare, providing a well-rounded perspective on the complexities. Real-world examples and research findings are presented to underscore the tangible and significant impact AI recommender systems have in the field of healthcare, particularly in nutrition. The ongoing efforts of applying AI in nutrition lay the groundwork for a future where personalized recommendations play a pivotal role in guiding
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the dire necessity to improve public health literacy for societal resilience. YouTube, the largest video-sharing social media platform, provides a vast repository of user-generated health information in a multi-media-rich format which may be easier for the public to understand and use if major concerns about content quality and accuracy are addressed. This study develops an automated solution to identify, retrieve and shortlist medically relevant and understandable YouTube videos that domain experts can subsequently review and recommend for disseminating and educating the public on the COVID-19 pandemic and similar public health outbreaks. Our approach leverages domain knowledge from human experts and machine learning and natural language processing methods to provide a scalable, replicable, and generalizable approach that can also be applied to enhance the management of many health conditions.
Mobile health has the potential to revolutionize health care delivery and patient engagement. In this work, we discuss how integrating Artificial Intelligence into digital health applications-focused on supply chain, patient management, and capacity building, among other use cases-can improve the health system and public health performance. We present an Artificial Intelligence and Reinforcement Learning platform that allows the delivery of adaptive interventions whose impact can be optimized through experimentation and real-time monitoring. The system can integrate multiple data sources and digital health applications. The flexibility of this platform to connect to various mobile health applications and digital devices and send personalized recommendations based on past data and predictions can significantly improve the impact of digital tools on health system outcomes. The potential for resource-poor settings, where the impact of this approach on health outcomes could be more decisive, is discussed specifically. This framework is, however, similarly applicable to improving efficiency in health systems where scarcity is not an issue.
This study is the first to investigate whether pawnshops, financial institutions for low-income populations, have contributed to the decline in mortality in the early twentieth century. Using ward-level panel data from Tokyo City, this study revealed that the popularity of public pawnshops was associated with a 4% and 5% decrease in infant mortality and fetal death rates, respectively, during 1927-1935. The historical context implies that the potential channels of the relationships were improving nutrition and hygiene and covering childbirth costs. Moreover, a cost-effectiveness calculation highlighted that the establishment of public pawnshops was a cost-effective public investment for better public health. Contrarily, for-profit private pawnshops showed no significant association with health improvements.
YouTube has rapidly emerged as a predominant platform for content consumption, effectively displacing conventional media such as television and news outlets. A part of the enormous video stream uploaded to this platform includes health-related content, both from official public health organizations, and from any individual or group that can make an account. The quality of information available on YouTube is a critical point of public health safety, especially when concerning major interventions, such as vaccination. This study differentiates itself from previous efforts of auditing YouTube videos on this topic by conducting a systematic daily collection of posted videos mentioning vaccination for the duration of 3 months. We show that the competition for the public's attention is between public health messaging by institutions and individual educators on one side, and commentators on society and politics on the other, the latest contributing the most to the videos expressing stances against vaccination. Videos opposing vaccination are more likely to mention politicians and publication media such as podcasts, reports, and news analysis, on the other hand, videos in favor are more li
Accurate nutritional assessment is critical for public health, but existing profiling systems require detailed data often unavailable or inaccessible from colloquial text descriptions of food. This paper presents a machine learning pipeline that predicts the comprehensive Food Compass Score 2.0 (FCS) from text descriptions. Our approach uses multi-headed neural networks to process hybrid feature vectors that combine semantic text embeddings, lexical patterns, and domain heuristics, alongside USDA Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies (FNDDS) data. The networks estimate the nutrient and food components necessary for the FCS algorithm. The system demonstratedstrong predictive power, achieving a median R^2 of 0.81 for individual nutrients. The predicted FCS correlated strongly with published values (Pearson's r = 0.77), with a mean absolute difference of 14.0 points. While errors were largest for ambiguous or processed foods, this methodology translates language into actionable nutritional information, enabling scalable dietary assessment for consumer applications and research.
A reasonable and balanced diet is essential for maintaining good health. With the advancements in deep learning, automated nutrition estimation method based on food images offers a promising solution for monitoring daily nutritional intake and promoting dietary health. While monocular image-based nutrition estimation is convenient, efficient, and economical, the challenge of limited accuracy remains a significant concern. To tackle this issue, we proposed DPF-Nutrition, an end-to-end nutrition estimation method using monocular images. In DPF-Nutrition, we introduced a depth prediction module to generate depth maps, thereby improving the accuracy of food portion estimation. Additionally, we designed an RGB-D fusion module that combined monocular images with the predicted depth information, resulting in better performance for nutrition estimation. To the best of our knowledge, this was the pioneering effort that integrated depth prediction and RGB-D fusion techniques in food nutrition estimation. Comprehensive experiments performed on Nutrition5k evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of DPF-Nutrition.
In a recent series of high impact public health publications, the c-index was used as measure of prediction to assess the public health relevance of a risk factor. I demonstrate that the c-index is an inferior measure as compared to the classical epidemiologic measures most commonly employed for risk prediction and public health assessment such as disease incidence, relative risk (RR) and population-attributable risk (PAR). I recommend using the latter measures when assessing the public health relevance of a risk factor.
Selecting the right monitoring level in Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) systems for e-healthcare is crucial for balancing patient outcomes, various resources, and patient's quality of life. A prior work has used one-dimensional health representations, but patient health is inherently multidimensional and typically consists of many measurable physiological factors. In this paper, we introduce a multidimensional health state model within the RPM framework and use dynamic programming to study optimal monitoring strategies. Our analysis reveals that the optimal control is characterized by switching curves (for two-dimensional health states) or switching hyper-surfaces (in general): patients switch to intensive monitoring when health measurements cross a specific multidimensional surface. We further study how the optimal switching curve varies for different medical conditions and model parameters. This finding of the optimal control structure provides actionable insights for clinicians and aids in resource planning. The tunable modeling framework enhances the applicability and effectiveness of RPM services across various medical conditions.
Electronic Health Record (EHR) has become an essential tool in the healthcare ecosystem, providing authorized clinicians with patients' health-related information for better treatment. While most developed countries are taking advantage of EHRs to improve their healthcare system, it remains challenging in developing countries to support clinical decision-making and public health using a computerized patient healthcare information system. This paper proposes a novel EHR architecture suitable for developing countries--an architecture that fosters inclusion and provides solutions tailored to all social classes and socioeconomic statuses. Our architecture foresees an internet-free (offline) solution to allow medical transactions between healthcare organizations, and the storage of EHRs in geographically underserved and rural areas. Moreover, we discuss how artificial intelligence can leverage anonymous health-related information to enable better public health policy and surveillance.