BUILT CoLAB, in partnership with CESAM – the Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies at the University of Aveiro – and as part of the ODESSA project, has developed an open-source WebGIS platform for forecasting hospital admissions associated with respiratory diseases and other non-communicable diseases linked to exposure to air pollution, with an initial focus on the Lisbon region.
In this partnership, BUILT CoLAB was responsible for developing the WebGIS platform and integrating the forecasting model. This model estimates the daily number of hospital admissions associated with non-communicable respiratory diseases in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, at the level of each Local Health Unit, establishing a link between air quality and health. The training and validation of the model were carried out by CESAM, based on real historical data on hospital admissions from the National Health Service (SNS), in a process independent of the platform’s development.
The forecasts generated by the model, as well as the input data relating to meteorological and air quality variables, are stored and made available on the platform. To support this provision, the visualisation component has been designed to allow intuitive exploration of the information, integrating map navigation tools, analysis of the location of weather stations and data from the QualAr network, as well as the visualisation of different geospatial layers, notably via GeoTIFF files.
ODESSA is a project funded by the FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, as part of the Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Cybersecurity for Public Administration programme. It is led by the Emissions, Modelling and Climate Change Group (GEMAC) at the University of Aveiro, under the coordination of Hélder Relvas.
