Impact of Indoor Mobility Behavior on the Respiratory Infectious Diseases Transmission Trends

Indoor human mobility plays a crucial role in the transmission of respiratory infectious diseases. Previous studies have predominantly addressed a single type or a series of behaviors in specific scenarios, neglecting the abstraction of mobility behavior in various scenes and how these abstracted behaviors impact disease propagation. To address these problems, this study abstracts mobility behaviors in a general scenario into two main categories: crowding behavior from the spatial aspect (i.e., a group of people gathering closely), and stopping behavior from the temporal aspect (i.e., someone remaining in one position without any change over time). Then, their impacts on disease spreading and the impact of individual spatiotemporal distribution resulting from these behaviors on epidemic transmission are investigated. First, behavioral factors and transmission trend indicators are defined, and the exposure risk with virion-laden particles (ERP) model is used as the fundamental for simulation. Second, 200 indoor scenarios are constructed and simulated to help determine variable values. Concurrently, the influences of target factors on disease transmission are determined using structural equation modeling and causal inference modeling. Final, guidelines are formulated to mitigate epidemic spread in indoor scenarios: prioritizing “increasing the number of point of interests (POIs) for a fixed number of people” compared to “making the distribution of POIs more dispersed” and “limiting the number of stoppings,” and ultimately using “shortening the duration of stopping” strategy; “directing the distribution of individuals more uniform” by implementing the aforementioned strategies or be conducted independently.