Personal Location as Health-Related Data: Public Knowledge, Public Concern, and Personal Action.

OBJECTIVES: Personal health information (PHI), including health status and behaviors, are often associated with personal locations. Smart devices and other technologies routinely collect personal location. Therefore, technologies collecting personal location do not just create generic questions of privacy, but specific concerns related to PHI. METHODS: To assess public opinion on the relationship between health, personal location, and privacy, a national survey of US residents was administered online in March 2020. Respondents answered questions about their use of smart devices and knowledge of location tracking. They also identified which of the locations they could visit were most private and how to balance possibilities that locations may be private but can also be useful to share. RESULTS: Of respondents that used smart devices (n = 688), a majority (71.1%) indicated they knew they had applications tracking their location, with respondents who were younger (P < .001) and male (P = .002) and with more education (P = .045) more likely to indicate "yes." When all respondents (N = 828) identified the locations on a hypothetical map they felt were most private, health-related locations (substance use treatment center, hospital, urgent care) were the most selected. CONCLUSIONS: The historical notion of PHI is no longer adequate and the public need greater education on how data from smart devices may be used to predict health status and behaviors. The COVID-19 pandemic brought increased attention to personal location as a tool for public health. Given healthcare's dependence upon trust, the field needs to lead the conversation and be viewed as protecting privacy while usefully leveraging location data.

Soft-etch mesoporous hole-conducting block copolymer templates.

We present a mesoporous hole-conducting polymer film resulting from spontaneous block copolymer self-assembly based on a simple spin-coating protocol. A diblock copolymer consisting of a triphenylamine side group polymer and a poly(d,l-lactide) block (PSTPA-b-PLA) is shown to microphase separate to form ordered 13 nm cylindrical PLA microdomains embedded in the semiconducting PSTPA matrix. Partially ordered and film-spanning PLA domains could be identified in films immediately after spin coating from toluene solutions on conducting substrates. Selective mild etching of the minority PLA domains (in weak aqueous base) leads to a mesoporous hole-conducting polymer matrix. The pore structure is replicated electrochemically in platinum, demonstrating the viability of this approach to producing nano-organized heterojunction structures in thin films.