ExpoAware: Environmental VGI for personal exposure awareness and healthy mobility behavior

• Applicants: Dr. Torsten Masson; Professor Dr. Uwe Schlink
• Subject Area: Geodesy, Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing, Geoinformatics, Cartography ; Human Geography
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 424979005

Urban areas are hotspots environmental stressors like noise, air pollution and heat. These stressors have an impact on our health and are to a high degree context specific distributed in space and time. Personal sensors advanced the way of environmental monitoring of these stressors and enable exposure measurements on the move. Therefore environmental VGI that is actively collected by laypeople can provide valuable knowledge about spatio-temporal exposures and mobility behavior at once. Smartphone sensing methods can additionally provide active sensing options to collect users perceptions and opinions about the exposure. This combination of subjective and objective VGI is a rich dataset to investigate not only the exposure, but also behavior and decision motifs of individuals during everyday mobility.In this project we therefore work on three main objectives: 1) How can environmental VGI generated with smartphones be used to extract spatio-temporal mobility pattern and exposure? 2) How can we retrieve subjective data and analyze behavioral changes when reporting back exposure data? 3) How can environmental VGI be used for the refinement of mobility and exposure models?We use smart sensors and an interventional study design based on an own developed framework of time geography and psychological theory to collect the VGI with laypeople from different socio-economic backgrounds. We will analyze the data with GIS based methods of space-time analytics and psychological statistics testing. To compare the empirical data with models we run agent-based simulations.The main aim of this project is to investigate the potential of environmental VGI to change mobility behavior according to a healthier route decision-making through raising exposure awareness.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1894: Volunteered Geographic Information: Interpretation, Visualisation and Social Computing
• International Connection: Luxembourg
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Martin Dijst
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Sebastian Bamberg