Authors:
Sebastian Unger
1
;
Sebastian Appelbaum
2
;
Thomas Ostermann
2
and
Christina Niedermann
3
;
2
Affiliations:
1
Didactics and Educational Research in Health Science, Witten/Herdecke University, Germany
;
2
Methods and Statistics in Psychology, Faculty of Health, Witten/Herdecke University, Germany
;
3
Fine Arts, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Ottersberg, Germany
Keyword(s):
Mental Health, Garden Design, Movement Analysis, Heatmap Analysis, Entropy, Homography.
Abstract:
Movement, actions, and intentions are important psychological skills in human behavior. Studies have shown correlations between movement activity and a variety of mental disorders. In this context, planning and designing of gardens and outdoor spaces as an intentional activity might play an important role as a marker for mental health. Thus, 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 movement activity was recorded with a camera from a fixed viewpoint. Movement heatmaps and entropy then was calculated and correlated with mental state measured via the Global Severity Index (GSI) of the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI-18) questionnaire. After finding an optimal grid size of the heatmaps, we were able to find a moderate negative correlation of r = -0.463 between these quantities in an overall of both genders, explaining 21.4 % of variance. After considering the gender of the test gro
up, a noticeable gender effect could be revealed. We found a significant interaction effect of entropy with gender meaning that a lower movement entropy in a gardening task correlates with a higher mental distress for men, but lower for women. Multivariate regression found that this model explained 77.44 % of variance (R = 0.88). Despite of these promising results, further investigations in this area should overcome some limitations in this pilot study in the field of position tracking and movement feature extraction.
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