DASH-SAFE

Pillar 3
Resilient/adaptive built environments

Need

Viral exposure risk derives from behavioral (lack of facial coverings and distancing, for example) and built environment factors associated with greater viral transmission. Recent focus groups with students about their perceived risks around COVID-19 re-entry on campus have revealed the need for actionable information and tools to reduce risk (Rains, Crane et al.,2020). There is also an urgent need to monitor vaccine distribution locations to reduce crowding and pinch points, and to optimize and safely maximize vaccine distribution flow. Near real-time geospatial and temporal information identifying riskier and safer areas and predicting pinch points and crowding will fill this need by allowing people to safely navigate through unfamiliar territories while reducing anxiety. It will also assist building and facilities management operators in identifying risk areas to implement mitigation strategies.

Proposed Solution

A multidisciplinary team of researchers is developing a dashboard (“DASH-SAFE”), which layers locations of subjective perceived risk and safety and objective measures of built environment viral spread risk factors over an interactive Geographic Information System (GIS) map to spatially and temporally visualize in near real-time locations of safety and risk. DASH-SAFE represents a unique, new application of GIS technologies to visualize emotional/perceived safety/risk responses in near real-time and place. A beta version of DASH-SAFE is currently being deployed and tested by UArizona facilities management personnel to monitor the UArizona Pima County vaccine POD. The novel building safety scoring system based on occupancy, building geometry, and air exchange rates will have relevance far beyond COVID, to other epidemics and pandemics but also to domains such as energy management. Once developed, this tool will be applicable to many clustered at-risk populations in campus-like settings, including university campuses, residential senior living communities, office and industrial parks, and many geographically defined communities.

Statement of Work

The master DASH-SAFE dashboard will receive inputs from multiple surveillance technologies, and map onto an interactive GIS map of a university campus(UArizona campus as testbed)to spatially and temporally overlay and visualize locations of (1) subjective perceptions of safety and risk related to adherence to COVID-19 viral spread mitigation guidelines; (2) predictive modeling of movement of people through campus over time to identify areas of crowding and pinch points; and (3) objective building design and building systems and operations information related to risk of viral spread(e.g., air exchange rates, occupancy, humidity, pinch points).