Connecting Air Quality with Emotional Well-Being and Neighborhood Infrastructure in a US City.

Connecting Air Quality with Emotional Well-Being and Neighborhood Infrastructure in a US City. Environ Health Insights. 2020;14:1178630220915488 Authors: Lal RM, Das K, Fan Y, Barkjohn KK, Botchwey N, Ramaswami A, Russell AG Abstract Cities in the United States have announced initiatives to become more sustainable, healthy, resilient, livable, and environmentally friendly. However, indicators for measuring all outcomes related to these targets and the synergies between them have not been well defined or studied. One such relationship is the linkage between air quality with emotional well-being (EWB) and neighborhood infrastructure. Here, regulatory monitoring, low-cost sensors (LCSs), and air quality modeling were combined to assess exposures to PM2.5 and traffic-related NOx in 6 Minneapolis, MN, neighborhoods of varying infrastructure parameters (median household income, urban vs suburban, and access to light rail). Residents of the study neighborhoods concurrently took real-time EWB assessments using a smart phone application, Daynamica, to gauge happiness, tiredness, stress, sadness, and pain. Both LCS PM2.5 observations and mobile-source-simulated NOx were calibrated using regulatory observations in Minneapolis. No statistically significant (α = 0.05) PM2.5 differences were found between urban poor and urban middle-income neighborhoods, but average mobile-source NOx was statistically significantly (α = 0.05) higher in t...
Source: Environmental Health Insights - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Environ Health Insights Source Type: research