Using Council Data to Investigate Health Outcomes
Auckland Council has a range of geospatial and infrastructure data available, which could potentially be linked with health data to provide insights. The purpose of this project was to investigate the data held by the council and describe how it could be used to inform healthcare.

Summer of Research
Project by Kaito Goto, University of Auckland, supervised by Quentin Thurier and Dan Exeter (Precision Driven Health and Orion Health).Auckland Council has a range of geospatial and infrastructure data available, which could potentially be linked with health data to provide insights. The purpose of this project was to investigate the data held by the council and describe how it could be used to inform healthcare.
In order to analyse the data, an R Shiny application was developed for visualisation of storm water pipes around the Auckland Region with attributes that potentially relate to pollution problems. The app can be accessed here.
Data sources that were available for visualisation were:
- Stormwater pipes network from Auckland Council
- History of beach/pollution measurements from LAWA
- History of rainfall volumes from NIWA
- Altitudes of stormwater pipes from Mapzen
The app can be used to find beaches that share similar pollution patterns as well as the characteristics of the storm water pipes nearby each of the pollution sites. Characteristics include installation dates, volumes and pipe materials.
By nature, if the Auckland public can be made more aware of the risks associated with spending time in each of the beaches in the Auckland Region, it will reduce the health risks for the people of our society.