Abstract
The use of mobile sensor methodologies in urban analytics to study ‘urban emotions’ is currently outpacing the science required to rigorously interpret the data generated. Interdisciplinary research on ‘urban stress’ could help inform urban wellbeing policies relating to healthier commuting and alleviation of work stress. The purpose of this paper is to address—through methodological experimentation—ethical, political and conceptual issues identified by critical social scientists with regards to emotion tracking, wearables and data analytics. We aim to encourage more dialogue between the critical approach and applied environmental health research. The definition of stress is not unambiguous or neutral and is mediated by the very technologies we use for research. We outline an integrative methodology in which we combine pilot field research using biosensing technologies, a novel method for identifying ‘moments of stress’ in a laboratory setting, psychometric surveys and narrative interviews on workplace and commuter stress in urban environments.
Highlights
The wide-spread availability of commercial and relatively affordable mobile biosensing technologies is shaping a new digitised and data-driven field of urban emotion analytics outside of laboratory contexts
We argue that more attention needs to be paid to the significant epistemological and ethical problems associated with defining and researching urban stress, and—looking beyond issues of data privacy—to the ‘data practices’ and analytic convention of the emerging spatial science of urban emotions
Knowing that we would have the small sample size commonplace in experimental biosensing research, we did not set out to test a specific hypothesis about the differences between these cities, or to unambiguously identify the drivers of workplace or commuter stress, but to provide proof of concept for the forms of data analysis that would be possible
Summary
The wide-spread availability of commercial and relatively affordable mobile biosensing technologies is shaping a new digitised and data-driven field of urban emotion analytics outside of laboratory contexts. Biosensing technologies which often collate a combination of physiological and psychological/survey data are being used in the tracking of people’s emotional responses as they move through the urban environment, and in self-monitoring and management of emotional and mental distress. The specific possibilities of researching emotional experience in cities through geospatial methods and location tracking has led to significant experimental work in this field, by geographic information scientists, environmental psychologists, neuroscientists and urban planners. Public Health 2020, 17, 9003; doi:10.3390/ijerph17239003 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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