Integrating multiple personalised sensors for measuring human responses to urban features: A pilot study

The urban environment is associated with human health and physical activities. With the advancement of sensing technology, wearable devices support tracking humans’ movement, health condition and behaviours in the real world settings. This has facilitated the ability of researchers to exploring the relationship between urban settings/forms and psychosocial wellbeing at the individual level. This pilot study employed three kinds of wearable devices: FrontRow wearable lifestyle camera, GPS tracker and Empatica 4 wristband to test the feasibility of objectively measuring the health effect of urban features. Volunteers (k=12) were recruited in November and December 2020 and asked to conduct a self-leading city tour with the equipment around the centre of Roskilde, Denmark. Two of them wore the sensors in their daily life for one-week. We utilized a naturalistic data collection strategy in an uncontrolled setting to test the feasibility of integrating GPS, wearable camera and health trackers together in daily life. In the analysis, we utilized machine learning to assess individuals' exposures to the urban environment from a large quantity of high-resolution images obtained from the wearable camera, and the effect on psychological responses. The rest of the paper discusses the feasibility of integrating the three sensors in monitoring the physiological responses to different urban forms or environments.