Public medical service facilities are among the most basic needs of the public and are directly related to residents’ health. The balanced development of medical service facilities is of great significance. Public medical service facilities can be divided into different levels according to their medical equipment, service catchment, and medical quality, which is very important but has been ignored for a long time in accessibility evaluations. In this research, based on the hospital and population datasets of Shenzhen, we propose a hierarchical two-step floating catchment area (H2SFCA) method to evaluate the spatial accessibility of public medical resources considering the factors at different levels of medical resources. In the proposed method, the spatial accessibility of each level of public medical service facilities are evaluated using different distance attenuation functions according to the medical service’s scope. In addition, a measurement is proposed to evaluate the equity of medical service facilities based on accessibility and population density distributions. To synthesize the general spatial accessibility and the distribution balance of public medical service facilities, we standardize the spatial accessibility of public medical service facilities at each level and then calculate the weighted sums of the accessibility of each level. The general spatial equity of public medical service facilities is also evaluated. The results show that the accessibility and distribution balance of medical resources performs dissimilarly at the three levels and can be discriminated within different regions of the city. The accessibility of citywide medical facilities in Shenzhen decreases from the city center to the suburban area in a radial pattern and the accessibility and distribution balance in the suburban areas needs improvement.
Residents’ activity space reflects multiple aspects of human life related to space, time, and type of activity. How to measure the activity space at multiple geographic scales remains a problem to be solved. Recently, the emergence of big data such as mobile phone data and point of interest data has brought access to massive geo-tagged datasets to identify human activity at multiple geographic scales and to explore the relationship with built environment. In this research, we propose a new method to measure three types of urban residents’ activity spaces—i.e., maintenance activity space, commuting activity space, and recreational activity space—using mobile phone data. The proposed method identifies the range of three types of residents’ activity space at multiple geographic scales and analyzing the relationship between the built environment and activity space. The research takes Zhuhai City as its case study and discovers the spatial patterns for three activity space types. The proposed method enables us to achieve a better understanding of the human activities of different kinds, as well as their relationships with the built environment.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.