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Abstract Research shows that certain external factors can affect the mental health of many people in a community. Moreover, the importance of mental health has significantly increased in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people communicate and express their emotions through social media platforms, which provide researchers with opportunities to examine insights into their opinions and mental state. While social sensing studies using social media data have flourished in the last decade, many studies using social media data to detect and predict mental health status have focused on the individual level. In this study, we aim to generate a social sensing index for mental health to monitor emotional well-being, which is closely related to mental health, and to identify daily trends in negative emotions at the city level. We conduct sentiment analysis on Twitter data and compute entropy of the degree of sentiment change to develop the index. We observe sentiment trends fluctuate significantly in response to unusual events. It is found that the social sensing index for mental health reflects both city-wide and local events that trigger negative emotions, as well as areas where negative emotions persist. The study contributes to the growing body of research that uses social media data to examine mental health at a city-level. We focus on mental health at the city-level rather than individual, which provides a broader perspective on the mental health of a population. Social sensing index for mental health allows public health professionals to monitor and identify persistent negative sentiments and potential areas where mental health issues may emerge. 

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented changes to various aspects of daily life, profoundly affecting human mobility. These changes in mobility patterns were not uniform, as numerous factors, including public health measures, socioeconomic status, and urban infrastructure, influenced them. This study examines human mobility changes during COVID-19 in San Diego County and New York City, employing Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) and various network measures to analyze connectivity and socioeconomic status (SES) within these regions. While many COVID-19 and mobility studies have revealed overall reductions in mobility or changes in mobility patterns, they often fail to specify ’where’ these changes occur and lack a detailed understanding of the relationship between SES and mobility changes. This creates a significant research gap in understanding the spatial and socioeconomic dimensions of mobility changes during the pandemic. This study aims to address this gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of how mobility patterns varied across different socioeconomic groups during the pandemic. By comparing mobility patterns before and during the pandemic, we aim to shed light on how this unprecedented event impacted different communities. Our research contributes to the literature by employing network science to examine COVID-19’s impact on human mobility, integrating SES variables into the analysis of mobility networks. This approach provides a detailed understanding of how social and economic factors influence movement patterns and urban connectivity, highlighting disparities in mobility and access across different socioeconomic groups. The results identify areas functioning as hubs or bridges and illustrate how these roles changed during COVID-19, revealing existing societal inequalities. Specifically, we observed that urban parks and rural areas with national parks became significant mobility hubs during the pandemic, while affluent areas with high educational attainment saw a decline in centrality measures, indicating a shift in urban mobility dynamics and exacerbating pre-existing socioeconomic disparities.