Barcelona will measure how air pollution affects mental health
By the editorial team. (Originally published in Spanish)
More than 300 residents of Barcelona will participate in CitieS-Health, a citizen science project to study how air pollution in the city affects mental health. The initiative, which we promote together with ISGlobal, a center promoted by the “la Caixa” Foundation, is funded by the European Commission (Horizon 2020) and aims to collect data on the level of stress, sleep quality and care of the city's inhabitants. The results obtained will be crossed with maps of pollution, noise, and green and blue spaces to estimate how much pollution the public is exposed to.
The data collection phase starts today and will last until the beginning of 2021. Once the results have been analysed, a collaborative action will be carried out with the participants to decide what joint actions can be developed to improve the environment and inform public policies.
Three ways to participate
To carry out the experiment, a mobile application has been designed in which the participants must provide information about their mood, their quality of sleep and their attention span. Three levels of participation have been designed depending on the degree of engagement that each person decides to assume. Each of these levels provides different details about personal results in the study.
In the first level of engagement, participants must answer a cognitive test through the app for two non-consecutive weeks and, in return, they will receive an estimate of the level of pollution in their home. In the second level, in addition to answering these questions, volunteers are invited to activate their geolocation in order to have more specific information on the routes and spaces where they spend more time during the day to cross it with pollution maps. The consideration is an individual estimate of exposure to pollution. In the third level, participants will receive a citizen kit containing a passive NO₂ capture tube that they must carry with them for a week. This way, they will receive the real data on the level of pollution to which they have been exposed collected in the tube.
Any resident of the city of Barcelona can participate as long as they are of legal age and have a smartphone to use the app, which will be available in Spanish and Catalan.
Mental health, a topic of interest to citizens
CitieS-Health's objective is to put citizens' concerns at the center of the research agenda. For this, the project has left the definition of the research question in the hands of the residents of Barcelona. A participatory process was carried out that involved more than 1,000 residents of Barcelona. Mental health was the most voted health issue.
The topic of mental health analysis is fundamental not only for the personal well-being of individuals, but also for achieving resilient and sustainable cities. Emotional, psychological and social well-being can help improve relationships and people's coping skills, increase educational attainment, improve employment opportunities, reduce physical health problems, reduce health care costs and social assistance, and build social capital.
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