Peer-reviewed veterinary case report
How mobility data helps track infectious disease spread
By Tillayeva N et al.·2026·Graduate School of Engineering, Japan·View original on Europe PMC →
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Original publication title: Outfitting the quest for spatial spread of infections: A review of mobility datasets for population health modelling.
Plain-English summary
This study looks at how understanding where people move can help track the spread of infectious diseases. Researchers reviewed 57 different sets of data about human movement, including 52 from real life and 5 that were created in a lab. They found that real-world data can be hard to access because of privacy issues, so they also discussed ways to create fake data that can still be useful for research. The authors emphasize the importance of improving how we generate this synthetic data and making real mobility data easier to access for future studies. Overall, the review suggests that better data collection and generation methods are needed to enhance our understanding of disease spread.
Abstract
Understanding the spatial dynamics of infectious disease spread is essential for modeling population health. A key component in such modeling is human mobility data, which informs how infections propagate across time and space. This review provides a comprehensive survey of both real-world and synthetic mobility datasets that have been used in the context of infectious disease modeling. Through the survey, we identified 57 publicly available datasets-52 real-world and 5 synthetic-offering a structured overview of current data sources. Additionally, because real-world data are often inaccessible due to privacy or technical constraints, we provide a concise overview of pseudo-mobility data generation methodologies to contextualize the synthetic datasets and guide future data-production efforts. The review highlights the need to advance synthetic data generation methodologies and improve the accessibility of high-resolution mobility data for future research in this domain.
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Search related cases →Original publication on Europe PMC: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42011322