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healthiar

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Introduction

healthiar is an R package to quantify and monetize health impacts attributable to exposure (e.g. air pollution, noise…) in a study area. Using healthiar, you can …

  • Quantify health impacts choosing among multiple input data formats and calculation pathways:

    • Exposure data as single value or as distribution

    • Relative risk or absolute risk

    • Fixed-shape or user-defined exposure-response functions

    • Single or age-specific baseline health data (life table approach)

  • Iterate across geographical units

  • Compare scenarios

  • Include and summarize uncertainties

  • Monetize health impacts or perform cost-benefit analyses adjusting for inflation and discounting

  • Consider social inequalities in the assessment and stratify the results

Getting started

You have different materials to learn about the R package healthiar.

Cheat sheet

Have a quick and visual look at the cheat sheet Package Cheatsheet

Vignette

Read the vignette (~ package manual) intro_to_healthiar, which you can access

  1. on the package website (recommended)

  2. in R Studio: Click on the Packages tab in RStudio, scroll down to the healthiar package and clicking on the hyperlinks healthiar > User guides, package vignettes and other documentation

  3. in the web browser: Run browseVignettes("healthiar") in the R console and the page will open up in your browser

Function documentation

See the function help pages for information about specific functions. In RStudio, you can access the function documentation of e.g. the function attribute_health by

  1. going to the reference page of the package website

  2. running ?attribute_health in RStudio (with healthiar loaded)

  3. going to the Packages tab and then clicking on healthiar

Video

Watch a 45 minutes video from an online international workshop (30 September 2025), which can be found here. The slides of the presentation can be found here.

Stay updated

We regularly improve healthiar and publish a new GitHub release every time a new version reaches CRAN. To make sure you don’t miss one:

  • Watch releases: on the GitHub repo, click Watch > Custom > tick Releases only, so you get notified without being flooded by every issue or discussion.

  • Star the repo: click Star on the GitHub repo to bookmark it and help others discover healthiar.

  • Subscribe via RSS/Atom: if you prefer a feed reader, subscribe to https://github.com/SwissTPH/healthiar/releases.atom.

  • Check the changelog: see what changed in each version on the changelog.

Each GitHub release is also archived on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18220360) if you need to reference a specific version snapshot rather than the package itself.

Installation

We recommend frequently installing the newest healthiar version. Please note that healthiar requires R version 4.2.0 or higher. There are two options to install healthiar:

  1. From CRAN:

1.- Click on the Packages tab in RStudio and on the Install button.

2.- Leave the Install from: option set to Reporsitory (CRAN).

3.- Search and select healthiar.

4.- Click on Install keeping Install dependencies activated.

  1. From Github (most recent version): Run the following commands below in RStudio:

1.- Install the package remotes (if not already installed):
install.packages("remotes")

2.- Install healthiar: remotes::install_github(repo = "SwissTPH/healthiar", build_vignettes = TRUE, dependencies = TRUE)

Note that you may be prompted to install or update additional packages dependencies required by healthiar.

After installation, do not forget to load the package by running the call library(healthiar).

Citation

We love that you use healthiar. In that case, please do not forget to cite healthiar in your work. Three options to get there:

  1. On the healthiar package website

  2. See CITATION.R

  3. In your R console, enter citation(“healthiar”).

In options b) and c), you always see the updated citation. In option a), you see citation of the healthiar version that you have installed locally, which might be outdated.

Disclaimer and licence

By using healthiar, you confirm that you agree with the following disclaimer and terms of the licence:

  1. Disclaimer: The R package healthiar is work in progress and the developers are not liable for the results.

  2. License: Available here.

Contributions

We welcome your contributions! Do you want to report a bug, provide code or just make a question/comment? Please, read and follow the guidelines of our guide for contributions By contributing to healthiar, you agree to abide by our code of conduct.

Presenting healthiar

If you would like us to present healthiar at a conference, lecture or training, please, contact us: alberto.castrofernandez@swisstph.ch and axel.luyten@swisstph.ch.

Acknowledgements

healthiar was been developed under the framework of EU project BEST-COST. BEST-COST is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme under Grant Agreement No.101095408.

Special thanks to our community members who submitted bug reports, suggested improvements, and provided valuable feedback to refine this package. Here some of them in alphabetical order: Federico Cussotto, Georgia Dyer, Brecht Devleesschauwer, Nicole Engelmann, Aletta Karsies, Sasha Kohmenkho, Heli Lehtomäki, Matthias Lochman, Enrico Pisoni, David Rojas Rueda & Maciek Strak.