Revealing Health Disparities with Visual Analytics in the Digital Era: From Individual Attributes to Global Patterns in Nutrition Surveillance

The surge of digital transformation and the advancement in the computational ability to store, analyze, and visualize intricate nutrition and health data has revolutionized the field of nutrition surveillance, significantly expanding its scope and volume. Nutrition and health data are experiencing exponential growth, encompassing a spectrum from omics read-outs to real-time personal app monitoring and global dietary intake patterns. This data expansion unveils unprecedented potential to comprehend the multifaceted dynamics of health and nutrition outcomes across three dimensions—time, space, and populations. The shift also presents challenges of effectively harnessing complex data from multiple sources to identify health and nutrition disparities and transforming information into actionable insights in a more precise and timely manner. This chapter aims to illustrate how these challenges can be transformed into opportunities through visual analytics—a tool that combines computational analysis techniques with interactive visualizations. We describe the current progress of visual analytics, emphasizing the pivotal role of nutrition and health dashboards in revealing health and nutrition disparities at the individual, community, country, and global levels. Furthermore, the chapter sheds light on existing data gaps, specifically addressing data granularity and aggregating data across time and space dimensions coupled with statistical modeling tools to enhance dashboard capabilities. Through this comprehensive assessment, we provide a holistic view of the multifaceted challenges and opportunities that arise at the intersection of visual analytics and nutrition surveillance.