Dashboard design and usability study for geospatially enabled information seeking to assist pandemic response and resilience

Abstract

Counties in Missouri are primarily rural. Rural communities often consist of individuals with poor health, lower economic status, and lack of public health infrastructure. During the COVID- 19 pandemic, most research was centered around urban-based data and thus did not provide the full-picture of vulnerabilities present in rural counties for stakeholders to consider when proactively planning for pandemics and making policies in regards to mitigation. To bridge the gap of urban and rural data availability, our team developed two interactive COVID-19 risk assessment dashboards using a 3-step design process that included identifying dashboard functionality based on the goals of stakeholders, collecting COVID-19 risk factor data, and selecting the appropriate type of dashboard visualizations in order for stakeholder needs to be met. Database processes were also created to promote a dynamic design in which risk factors can be easily updated, added, and removed from the risk assessment as COVID-19 progresses and more evidence is collected, keeping the risk assessment relevant. Using our dashboards, users can create customized risk assessments based on six categories of risk: susceptibility, transmission, accessibility, socioeconomic, health culture, and exposure, and geospatially visualize risk throughout counties with the ability to apply a rural/urban filter. Users can also drill-down to a specific county and learn about the prevalence and magnitude of 87 risk factors while looking for spatial trends and how counties with specific risk profiles were affected by COVID-19. A usability study was conducted to ensure that our platform is meaningful and can be easily navigated to aid with pandemic mitigation, healthcare planning, and research. An optimized version of this tool would not only help with planning for COVID-19 variants, future pandemics, and research in Missouri, but also be applied to all states of the United Stat