Using Pedestrians’ Physiological Responses to Assess a Neighborhood’s Physical Disorder
With the growth of interest in the relationships between built environments with physical activity, public health, and pedestrian safety, various efforts have been made to identify and assess physical disorders of the built environment. Traditional assessment approaches mainly rely on trained inspectors, which require significant cost and time, and most of these methods lack reliability as they depend on subjective judgment to determine conditions of physical environment. In this context, this study explores the potential for using crowd-sourced physiological sensory data from pedestrians (e.g., gait and heart rate data) to identify and assess physical disorders of the built environment. Though previous studies indicate that humans present diverse physiological responses in their interactions with environment, there is a lack of empirical research exploring the physiological effect of built environment on walking activity.In an experiment conducted in a neighborhood of Lincoln, Nebraska, participants were asked to walk on a pre-defined path consisting of sixty measurement units. Three types of data (wearable Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), photoplethysmography (PPG), and Global Positioning System (GPS)) were collected for each participant in order to examine the relationship between their physiological responses and the existing physical disorders in the path. The results from this test indicate that the average values of physiological responses of participants in measurement units with physical disorders is significantly different than the average values of physiological responses of participants in measurement units without physical disorders. The results of this study will help improve the continuous measurement of physical disorders, thereby enhancing walkability.
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANF10 Standing Committee on Pedestrians.
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Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001 -
Authors:
- Bisadi, Mohammad
- Kim, Hyunsoo
- Ahn, Changbum R
- Nam, Yunwoo
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
- Date: 2017
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; Photos; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 14p
- Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Built environment; Global Positioning System; Heart rate; Neighborhoods; Pedestrians; Physiological aspects; Walkability
- Uncontrolled Terms: Inertial measurement units; Pedestrian gait analysis
- Subject Areas: Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01623105
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 17-03233
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Jan 24 2017 3:15PM