We are a multidisciplinary team using digital footprint data to understand people’s behaviour and health. Currently we are focusing on transaction data, specifically loyalty and banking cards, and working on realising the value of using these data to improve population health.
For instance, loyalty cards data can help to understand diet and alcohol consumption, while banking records can help to unpack factors influencing wellbeing and mental health. We are interested in a wide range of application areas, for example:
Menstruation affects half the population yet remains under-researched.
Poppy is exploring what shopping data can reveal about how people manage their menstrual symptoms—like pain and heavy bleeding—and whether inequalities influence these behaviours.
Neo is exploring how donated shopping data can be used to study chronic pain, linking purchase patterns of pain relief products with self-reported pain experiences. This approach allows the team to develop scalable measures of chronic pain and its economic and personal impacts.
We are working with ALSPAC and other longitudinal population studies (LPS) to create a methodology for linking transaction data into LPS. The project explores participants’ attitudes, ethical data handling, dataset quality, and safe access for academic research.
The majority of projects are funded by UKRI, Alan Turing Institute and University of Bristol.