EpiMob: Interactive Visual Analytics of Citywide Human Mobility Restrictions for Epidemic Control

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has swept more than 180 countries and territories since late January 2020. As a worldwide emergency response, governments have taken various measures and policies such as self-quarantine, travel restriction, work at home, and region lockdown, to control the rapid spread of this epidemic. The common concept of these countermeasures is to conduct human mobility restrictions as COVID-19 is a highly contagious disease with human-to-human transmission. It becomes an urgent request from medical experts and policymakers to effectively evaluate the effects of human restriction policies with the aid of big data and information technology. Thus, in this study, based on big human mobility data and city POI data, we design an interactive visual analytics system called EpiMob (Epidemic Mobility) to intuitively demonstrate and simulate how the human mobility, as well as the number of infected people, will change according to a certain restriction policy or a combination of policies. EpiMob is made up of a set of coupled modules: a data processing module for data cleansing, interpolation, and indexing; a simulation module based on a modified trajectory-based SEIR model; an interaction visualization module to interactively visualize the analytical results in light of user's settings. Through multiple case studies for the biggest city of Japan (i.e., Tokyo) and domain expert interviews, we demonstrate that our system can be beneficial to give an illustrative insight in measuring and comparing the effects of different human mobility restriction policies for epidemic control.