Periodic Reporting for period 2 - eMOTIONAL Cities (eMOTIONAL Cities - Mapping the cities through the senses of those who make them)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2022-09-01 do 2024-02-29
It is well known that the world population are continuously growing and, at the same time, more people prefer to live in urban areas. Moreover, according to the Factsheet on Promoting Mental Health of the Health at a Glance: Europe 2018 (OECD): “more than one in six people in EU countries have a mental health problem in a given year”; and such mental ill-health cost EU 2015 economies over EUR 600 billion, of which more than two-thirds was due to lost productivity. Recently, there have been some scientific studies searching for evidence on how urban environment affects human mental wellbeing, claiming that nature within cities contributes to reduce stress and depression. However, most of them have failed to find such evidence. Moreover, sentiments and people’s emotions are difficult to measure and require an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approach, to avoid bias and groundless claims. For instance, many reported studies and research papers draw on self-reported happiness or use wellbeing measures, which are not powerful enough to generate meaningful dose-response or spatiotemporal models to fully grasp the associations between urban exposures and disease risk factors and mechanisms for mental health outcomes. In the eMOTIONAL Cities project, we explore innovative aspects about human-environment interactions in urban settings based on digital embodied methods, use of wearable devices and biosensing technology to address underlying confounding factors. The overall objective is to provide robust scientific evidence on how the urban built environment shapes the neural circuits underlying human cognitive and emotional processing. Grasping the spatial cognition of the citizens’ behaviour and decisions while interacting with their real-life surroundings will be a breakthrough. A better understanding on how the urban space – and its geographical and social context – contributes to the psychological distress or could have restorative properties will impact on three critical dimensions: citizens awareness, for co-production of knowledge; evidence-based policymaking, for socio-spatial tailored actions; and urban planning and public (mental) health practice, for the design healthier and sustainable public spaces.
The work performed during this first reporting period the work performed was focused on requirements to ensure the success of next stages. First, we generated a neurourbanistic glossary to reunite all disciplines. For more systematic data collection, we conducted a review on the nature of the relationship between urban spaces and mental health. Additionally, we performed another review about empirical studies investigating the impact of urban built and natural exposure on cognitive and emotional brain activity. This work led to an evidence-based conceptual framework. The implementation of a spatial data infrastructure capable of storing and querying both geospatial and neuroscience datasets is critical to our goals. The performed work provided standards and recommendations for both spatial analysis and neuroscience data. Another important development was the geospatial analysis performed to identify variables and metrics related to the urban physical and socioeconomic environment that mostly affect physical and mental health outcomes. Moreover, our preliminary work on sentiment analysis was innovative and offers great opportunity to explore the relationship between public sentiment and urban environment. At the heart of our research and innovation action are the neuroscience experiments. For this, we worked on the implementation of a novel VR/AR framework to be used for prototyping and running indoor testing; and, for the wide range of behavioural, environmental and physiological signals expected to be recorded. Furthermore, a wealth of pilot human-centred data has been already collected in real-life urban settings with promise results for next phase of experiments. Our consortium was actively involved in several events to raise awareness, combat misinformation, and strengthen public trust in our urban health research. We launched our website, developed a promotional video and established social media accounts to facilitate knowledge sharing and reach out researchers, policymakers and practitioners. The transversal work of project management and coordination secured progress monitoring, administrative and financial support, as well as appropriate internal communication and validation. Finally, our consortium was actively involved in the European Urban Health Cluster.
Evidence about the impact of urban interventions on mental health and wellbeing is scarce. Cities are complex systems and, thus, it is hard to infer causal associations within the system. Research to explore the links between urban systems with health requires more robust and interdisciplinary research. In the project we developed a novel conceptual and methodological geoemotional approach. We aim to analyse and measure, from a psychophysiological perspective, how people respond to urban stimuli combining biosensing, neuroscience, urban analytics, and surveys. Hence, the expected outcomes will provide insights into how urban built environments impact people’s mood, lifestyle, work, travelling and, ultimately, mental health and well-being. By integrating neuroscience knowledge and tools to facilitate a deeper understanding of the underlying biological and psychological processes, our research will provide mechanistic evidence on how to create urban environments to promote healthy living. At the same time, it will provide robust knowledge to empower European and global communities for tackling contemporary challenges, such as climate change, air and noise pollution, as well as social inequities on access to (mental) health care. From an economical perspective, our approach can be adopted (with potential high impact and job creation) across different markets, such as the real estate market, geodemographics and marketing companies, urban analytics and geospatial intelligence. Another societal implication of the project will be our Spatial Data Infrastructure. Built in line with the recommendations of best practices from the Open Geospatial Consortium and following the data FAIR principles, it promotes the access to data and knowledge, empower citizens and policymakers as well. The richness of our heterogenous dataset will leverage the development of new tools for scientific interrogation and could be very powerful for adopting largescale collaborative datasets. Furthermore, it will also allow the post-project dissemination of the project conceptual framework, through subsequent cross-disciplinary collaborations between geospatial and neuroscience research groups worldwide. Moreover, we have developed a “emotional walker” wearable kit that allows us to collect georeferenced microclimate and human-level psychophysiological data. The fusion of these physiological features and self-reporting tools for mental state assessment, with state-of-the-art AI models, will allow us to derive a deep interpretation of the human (brain) and environment interaction. Preliminary results dissemination have caught the attention of local and national stakeholders, international organizations in various fields (of architecture, construction, real state and urban development) and academia.