A NEW online tool from Oxford researchers is using mobile phone data to understand and predict the impact of the UK’s coronavirus social distancing measures on population movements.
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Developed by a team of AI and big data researchers at Oxford Unviversity, the academics are able to track everything from how Oxfordshire compares to the rest of the UK to the least busy time to visit a supermarket.
Daily population movement
The Oxford Covid-19 Impact Monitor has already revealed how life in the UK has changed since the coronavirus outbreak.
It shows 19 million Britons are the most at risk of Covid-19 because of age and underlying health conditions.
Population movement has dropped by 99 per cent since the beginning of March - with a drop of 95.49 per cent in the Oxfordshire CCG area.
Despite the good weather, 55 per cent of Britons stayed at home entirely on Easter Monday.
The data also shows the least busiest time to visit a supermarket is currently Tuesday at 9am.
And despite a surge in Covid-19 hospital admissions, overall hospital footfall has fallen by 80 per cent.
The flow of people between regions in the UK has tumbled by 76 per cent.
To allay privacy concerns the Oxford Covid-19 Impact Monitor only uses anonymised and aggregated mobile phone location data.
This GDPR-compliant data is then used to power interactive digital dashboards that can help policymakers, clinicians and the general public to understand better the impact of Covid-19 on the NHS and the wider community.
The online dashboards are free and publicly available, together with key insights from the data.
Analyses can be carried out at different degrees of geographic detail, including at the local and regional levels, and also for specific NHS hospital catchment areas.
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Dr Adam Saunders, part of the Oxford team, said: "The monitoring of population movements in response to the Covid-19 pandemic has received considerable attention following its use in China, South Korea and Singapore, the countries where the virus impacted earliest.
"The team came together to do what we could to help tackle the challenge facing the UK through the use of ethical big data analytics for the public good."
Fellow researcher Dr Matthias Qian added: "Getting insights from big data is key if the UK is effectively to fight coronavirus, whilst at the same time making costly measures such as social distancing work as efficiently as possible.
"Fully anonymised and aggregated mobile phone location data provides a responsible approach for revealing important insights for the NHS, the government and the wider public, which can help save lives."
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