Mobile Sensing for Wellbeing Estimation of Urban Green using Physiological Signals

Abstract

Designing for wellbeing and a better quality of life is a challenge due to individual differences and contextual influences. How a person feels may depend on inner-body and outerbody circumstances. Moreover, some places may foster while others hinder wellbeing. The objective of this paper is to identify typical patterns across characteristics of the urban environment, the user's self-reported wellbeing as well as physiological measures as indicators of wellbeing. To this end, we conducted a study with 7 participants in an urban environment covering different kinds of climate zones. In addition to multi-sensor data collection, participants were asked to provide location-specific experience samples with the help of off-the-shelf wrist accessories and a smartphone. The paper at hand presents classification results for the collected data. It furthermore analyzes the limitations of the approach and discusses the potential for future therapeutic applications that enhance the value of urban green by making use of sensory technologies. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing Ubiquitous and mobile computing systems and tools;

Mapping the urban environment using real-time physiological monitoring

“…Initially, most studies were connected to emotions, but in the past two years, there has been a shift towards stress-related research. Some studies focus on a specific theme, such as thermal comfort and heat stress (Flutura et al , 2019; Nakayoshi et al , 2015), safety (De Silva et al , 2017), or the effect of crowding density (Engelniederhammer et al , 2019) and isovist properties (Hijazi et al , 2016; Xiang and Papastefanou, 2019) on emotions. Other studies focus on a specific demographic, such as visually impaired adults (Massot et al , 2012; Saitis and Kalimeri, 2018), middle-aged hypertensive adults (Song et al , 2015a) and older adults (Lee et al , 2020; Neale et al , 2017; Tilley et al , 2017).…”

“…Studies on cycling were mostly focused on stress (n 5 5), whereas studies on walking were more balanced in terms of thematic. Outdoor walking activity typically lasted between 15 and 45 min, with few exceptions (Flutura et al, 2019;Komori et al, 2017). Only 4 studies complemented the outdoor data collection with a controlled experiment in the Physiological data mapping for urban studies laboratory (Engelniederhammer et al, 2019;Hogertz et al, 2010;Kyriakou et al, 2019;Osborne and Jones, 2017).…”