Integrating activity spaces in health research: Comparing the VERITAS activity space questionnaire with 7-day GPS tracking and prompted recall

Abstract

There is a spatial correspondence between destinations collected through VERITAS and 7-day GPS tracking. Both collection methods offer complementary ways to assess daily mobilities, useful to study environmental determinants of health and health inequities.

Obesity and the Built Environment: A Reappraisal

“…Acknowledging that an individual’s home neighborhood cannot capture the full extent of health‐related BE exposure, researchers turned to more advanced GPS technologies to track movements in space and time . Cumulative mobility over a given time period is the basis for constructing AS areas .…”

“…The literature examining whether BE features captured in an individual’s AS are more predictive of health than home‐centric‐defined features is relatively nascent . In some cases, AS‐defined food and structural environment features have been shown to be more predictive of health behaviors than those captured in the home neighborhood.…”

“…Capturing the full contextual exposome, the totality of BE exposures at the individual level, has been described as fundamental to a better understanding of diet, obesity, and diabetes . The promise of evaluations of the BE was to show a causal link between elements of the BE, or changes in the BE over time, and obesity or other health outcomes . To that end, evaluations of BE exposures have sought to develop methods to more accurately and completely capture elements of the BE.…”

“…Accordingly, such BE measurement tools have become increasingly more sophisticated using wearable GPS devices, often augmented with travel diaries, travel logs, Google street views, or other mobile technologies . These approaches allow the capture of near instantaneous measures of exposure to the BE not only around the home location but also at work, school, and along travel routes . Mobile technologies have become increasingly atomized, allowing researchers to capture the minutiae of daily activities in time and space, sometimes at time resolutions of 10 seconds or less.…”

“…The almost exclusive focus on quantifying BE exposure, together with cross‐sectional study designs , has limited the ability to draw causal inferences regarding potential links between BE exposure and obesity . Furthermore, there seems to be a conceptual disconnect between current measures of BE exposure and the long‐term trajectories of body weight.…”