News - TEDMED Visualization Challenge

NEW YORK - How does our neighborhood affect our health? Create a visualization showing the relationship between green space and public health, enter it by 11:59PM EST on December 31, and win a prize valued at $8,000.

Use public data to visualize the relationship between green space and public health. What is the relationship between the amount of green spaces and human health? Epidemiologists, for instance, have noted a marked decrease in asthma rates when more trees were planted in urban habitats. Yet on a nation-wide—or even global—basis, this phenomenon largely goes undescribed. Robust data sets are available for both city landscapes (urban parks, gardens, ʻemerald necklaceʼ corridors) and a number of health/disease indices (asthma rates, sick days, obesity, etc.). Visualizing their intersection would be an enormous first step towards seeing their correlations. From there, researchers will begin to tease out the underlying causes—reduced air pollution, increased exercise, for example—that give rise to better human health.