Measuring individuals’ mobility-based exposure to neighborhood physical disorder with wearable cameras

Abstract

To date, most studies have assessed individual exposure to neighborhood physical disorder (NPD) through the static residence-based approach, which ignores elements of human mobility and may lead to inaccurate estimates. This study assessed individual exposure to neighborhood physical disorder through the mobility-based approach using wearable cameras. The use of this approach allowed us to leverage innovative tools to accurately assess exposure to NPD in individuals' activities in space-time. We assessed the volunteers’ exposure to neighborhood physical disorder by manually auditing pictures taken by wearable cameras on an online browser-based assessment platform. The results illustrated that wearable cameras can clearly capture the exposure while volunteers were engaged in travel behaviors. We also compared the proposed approach (mobility-based, using wearable cameras to take photos) with other approaches (with consideration of travel behaviors to varying degrees, using street view images) to demonstrate that wearable cameras can record individual exposure to neighborhood physical disorder accurately and conveniently, and the assessment results might be significantly different from those obtained by other approaches. Thus, the proposed approach is of great significance.