Quantifying Heterogeneous Impacts of Geolocated mHealth Tracing on Spatiotemporal Transmission of Emerging Infections

Abstract

Digital health tools, including mobile device location‐based health (mHealth) applications, have been adopted to augment conventional contact tracing during recent epidemics and pandemics, yet quantitative evidence about their added epidemiological value remains limited. Using aggregated, privacy‐preserving mHealth data from six Chinese cities (July 2021–May 2022), we modelled transmission dynamics of emerging respiratory infections to quantify the heterogeneous effects of mHealth‐triggered movement restrictions and risk‐based quarantines across viral variants. We found that the mHealth‐assisted interventions, together with population‐wide lockdowns, could rapidly reduce the effective infection rate and drive daily incidence toward zero within two weeks, which was rarely achieved through traditional contact tracing alone. Scenario simulations further showed that in the absence of mHealth interventions, infections consistently propagated to connected cities across a wide range of epidemiological assumptions, contradicting the reality. These results suggest that early integration of geolocated mHealth tools with traditional epidemiological investigations enhances outbreak containment at both local and regional scales, providing quantitative, spatially explicit evidence to inform scalable mHealth integration strategies for future infectious threats with pandemic potential.