Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Application for Health: Case of Al Ain (UAE)

要旨

Recently, there is an increase in the number of studies in UAE that examine the life style in relation to health and diseases. Example of these are the UAE Health and Life Style Survey 2000 (Badrinath et al., 2002) and the World Health Survey by WHO and Ministry of Health (Public Health, 2009). Although these studies try to provide a general trend of the common diseases and lifestyle in UAE, the majority of them did not put the geographic location and the environment surrounding it into consideration. The objective of this research is to assess the geographical distribution of health facilities and the impact of climatic conditions on diseases in Al Ain, UAE. Spatial and statistical analysis was used to aid in mapping the overall picture for health in Al Ain City, UAE. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) helped in linking the cases at clinics with population density, hence it provided a multi-layer analysis capability.GIS also provides a better modeling and visualization of the cases in spatio-temporal dimension. People who work in public and environmental health can get use of this study to demonstrate the applicability of GIS for analyzing health data.