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ISF Workshop: Urban innovation through

walkability and spatial cognition

September 19-21, 2022, Tel Aviv University

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Dr. Basile Chaix

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Basile Chaix is a research director at Inserm. He coordinates the Nemesis team at the Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health, at the National Institute of Medical Research and Sorbonne Université. The team examines how urban environments influence health, explores the impact of transport on health (benefits and exposures associated with the different modes), and study the health effects of heat waves inside and outside the urban heat island. This work is interested in the dynamics of exposure, behavior, and health status in space and time based on fine-grained space-time referenced data. The different projects rely on a monitoring of participants with wearable sensors of location, behavior, environmental exposures, and health, and with the Eco-emo tracker smartphone application developed by the team. Basile Chaix is Associate Editor at Health & Place et member of the editorial board of Epidemiology.

Questionnaire and sensor-based investigations of walking: determinants, benefits, and environmental exposures

Abstract:

The presentation will be devoted to the successive generations of work that the Nemesis team has conducted on the determinants of walking in the region of Paris, France. The first generation of work was based on the RECORD Cohort study where detailed walking activity questionnaires were administered to >7000 participants. The participants were geocoded at their residential address, which allowed us to assess numerous potential geographic and environmental determinants of walking. We estimated multilevel or spatial regression models adjusted for various individual characteristics to estimate associations between environmental factors and walking. We distinguished between utilitarian walking and recreational walking. The environmental determinants of walking tended to differ between utilitarian walking and recreational walking, although some were common (e.g., the density of destinations and services). Geographic factors making the environment agreeable (green spaces) or disagreeable (air traffic noise) were found to affect recreational walking. More recently, in the RECORD GPS and RECORD MultiSensor studies, we investigated the geographic determinants of walking with more accurate techniques including GPS tracking, a related GPS-based mobility survey, and accelerometers. Using this approach, we were able to investigate the determinants of walking not at the individual level as in our previous analyses but at the trip level, comparing individual to themselves in their successive trips rather than conducting between-individual comparison. The findings of this sensor-based approach highlight the importance of green spaces and the density of services as promoters of walking. In the MobiliSense study, we were also able to examine the exposure to air pollutants and noise during walking episodes. The presentation will both develop methodological considerations and report empirical findings.

(Monday, Sept. 19, 2022, 14:30-16:00 IL)

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