Tracking human spatial motion in the design of gardens as a potential method to detect mental disorders – a pilot study

Movement, actions, and intentions are important psychological skills in human behavior.
In the past, studies have shown that complex psychological abilities of humans strongly correlate with movement or mobility behavior, e.g. early stages of dementia could be detected based on drawing movements and activity levels of daily life could be measured based on the design of gardens and outdoor spaces.
Gender differences are acknowledged but have not been investigated in domain-specific bases.
In this study, 16 subjects (8 female) aged between 19 and 60 were asked to do a gardening task in an experimentally constructed environment, while their behavior is recorded with a camera from a fixed viewpoint.
Movement patterns and the resulting space used for the gardening task were tracked with a self-developed application, using a homography approach to create spatial movement trajectory maps.
The mental state was measured via the global severity index (GSI) of the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) questionnaire.
Based on these spatial movement maps, differences could be determined between the subjects with a tendency of an inverse relation.
After considering the gender of the test group, we found a noticeable interaction of spatial movement within the subgroups: lower movement activity in a gardening task correlated with a higher mental distress for male participants (r=-0.683), but with a lower for female participants (r=0.713). In line with these results, a multivariate regression model explained 59.54% of variance.
Further investigations, such as the use of heatmaps of motion and entropy measures as well as the enhancement of the application, are potential directions of research and are discussed.

IV International Symposium on Horticulture in Europe – SHE2021

S. Unger, T. Ostermann, S. Appelbaum, C. Niedermann

mental health, garden design, movement analysis, digital tracking, homography

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2021.1327.105