How Mobility and Temporal Contexts May Affect Environmental Exposure Measurements: Using Outdoor Artificial Light at Night (ALAN) and Urban Green Space as Examples

Temporal contexts are essential for the derivation of causally relevant environmental exposure in environmental and public health studies. We argue that the proper temporal contexts need further emphasis in the mobility-oriented research paradigm and articulate this issue using a study in Hong Kong. We use people’s exposure to outdoor artificial light at night (ALAN) and green space as two essential examples. We recruited 208 participants from two representative communities in Hong Kong and derived their mobility-oriented environmental exposures from high-resolution remote sensing data and Google Street View imagery. We employed one-standard-deviational ellipses to quantitatively represent participants’ activity spaces, and we further used participants’ seven-day Global Positioning System trajectories to derive their spatiotemporally weighted exposures to green space and outdoor ALAN in different temporal contexts. Multiple t tests were used to examine the disparities in activity spaces and measured exposures in different temporal contexts, and these exposure measurements were then used to predict people’s health outcomes. We found that people’s activity spaces are significantly different in size between day and night, for both weekdays and weekends, and in both geographic contexts. We further observed that improper temporal contexts could lead to significantly different environmental exposure levels and causally irrelevant modeling results.