The Relationship Between Mobility and Population Health in Urban Areas

Urban mobility may provide insight into population health by capturing how residents connect to services, resources, and urban systems. This is relevant for communities facing higher disease burden and limited resources, where reduced connectivity may signal barriers to care, healthy environments, and participation. Mobility patterns are furthermore shaped by socioeconomic position, housing, environmental quality, facilities access, lifestyle patterns, and population composition. Mobility-health associations may therefore reflect underlying social and environmental disadvantage rather than mobility itself, risking misdirected public-health policy responses. This ecological cross-sectional study examined associations between aggregated mobile phone-based mobility and health outcomes in The Hague, Netherlands, from January-July 2019. Mobile phone mobility was measured as mean outgoing mobility distance across eight regions. Contextual and health indicators were available at neighbourhood-level and were aggregated or linked to regions where required. Health outcomes were operationalised as indicators of disease burden, including cardiometabolic medication prescriptions, polypharmacy, and a syndemic-based measure of interacting health conditions. Contextual domains were selected using spatial clustering and ordinary least squares models, after which residual mobility-health associations were assessed. Outgoing mobility varied across regions and was strongly patterned by contextual factors. Lifestyle, housing, physical environment, and income accounted for 73.2% of variance in outgoing mobility. After adjustment, residual mobility showed weak, non-significant associations with cardiometabolic medication prescription, polypharmacy, and the syndemic-based measure. Sensitivity analyses supported these findings. Aggregated mobility should not be interpreted as a straightforward independent determinant of health. Instead, it appears to function as an integrative marker of urban context, spatial structure, and population composition.