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Stress-Less Walking

Using wearable sensors and surveys, researchers explore how to reduce stress and enhance pedestrians’ well-being

By Albert Stumm

Y our heartbeat quickens, microscopic beads of sweat form on your skin and, suddenly, you’re sprinting to cross an intersection just before the light turns red. In your smartwatch, embedded sensors collect the subtle changes in your body and transmit the data to researchers who want to know one thing:

How do you feel crossing that intersection?

That’s one way of looking at the research being conducted by Arash Tavakoli, PhD, who was recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation. He is studying the impact of pedestrian infrastructure on various facets of human well-being, as measured through wearable multimodal psychophysiological sensors (like smartwatches).

“We are interested to know, can we detect a person being completely frustrated by an intersection based solely on their physiological signals?” says Dr. Tavakoli, assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The project, “From Data to Design: Enhancing Pedestrian Infrastructure for Well-Being Through Mobile Sensing and Experience Sampling in the Wild,” will collect data from student, faculty and staff volunteers. In the first stage, the data is intended to identify areas that cause pedestrians distress. Later, in a collaborative workshop, researchers will work with community members and stakeholders such as urban planners, to codesign problematic locations. Then the designs will be generated in the developed virtual reality platform and tested for their efficacy, user interaction and effects on pedestrian well-being.

Remodeling ideas will be tested on virtual reality pedestrian simulators that have headgear with even more sensors, such as those that measure oxygen in the brain to see which parts are more active when navigating a potential new intersection.

Dr. Tavakoli stresses that the research is not about walkability, but rather about pedestrians’ well-being. For instance, an intersection may have sidewalks and timed pedestrian signage, but they may be unclean, in disrepair or covered with snow. “People who choose to walk wind up getting stressed,” he says, noting that the conditions might discourage them from walking next time.

Participants will also receive surveys a few times a day—a technique known as experience sampling—asking that they rate their stress level and positive or negative emotions on a scale of 1 to 10.

Dr. Tavakoli’s research assistant, Yasaman Hakiminejad, a PhD candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering, helped design the questionnaires based on previous psychological research. “We ask about participants’ sleep quality, stress level and mental load,” says Hakiminejad, who is in her second year studying transportation. “At the end of the day we ask them, ‘Did you walk today, and is there anything that you saw in the infrastructure that, in your opinion, was a problem?’”

Answers are paired with the physiological data gathered from the watch. The goal is to create a model that predicts how pedestrians will feel when encountering various infrastructure elements. Policymakers could use it to see which areas of a city need the most attention and to better plan for future developments.

“We always predict things like congestion, pollution or safety,” Dr. Tavakoli says. “But this time we're saying, ‘What if I change this intersection in a way that prioritizes pedestrians?’”