Health & Place publishes our systematic review on tools for measuring senior behaviors in urban nature, highlighting health benefits and behavioral patterns​.

Nature AI Lab
2025-01-06

We are glad to share our new paper:
Fan, Yuan., Chen, Mingze*. A systematic review of measurement tools and senior engagement in urban nature: Health benefits and behavioral patterns analysis. Health and Place 2025 | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2024.103410.[download]

📢 Background :
With rapid urbanization and a growing aging population, urban green spaces have become essential for promoting physical, mental, and social well-being. Yet, assessing seniors’ behaviors and health outcomes in urban nature faces challenges due to diverse methodologies, fragmented data, and inconsistent tools.
This review addresses these gaps by providing a systematic evaluation of measurement tools and their applications, offering insights into designing age-friendly urban environments and supporting healthy aging policies.

🔍 Research Objectives and Question :
In the field of urban nature, there has been no comprehensive evaluation of the pros and cons of different methods, nor has there been an identification of which behaviors are best monitored by which tools or a detailed account of the benefits each behavior brings to seniors. This lack of systematic and comprehensive attention to all types of tools and behaviors underscores the need for a reference standard to choose appropriate measurement tools and behavior types based on specific research objectives. To address this gap, this paper aims to comprehensively review the relationship between monitoring tools, seniors’ behaviors, and influencing factors. The research questions include:
(1) What tools can detect seniors’ behaviors in urban nature?
(2) What are the advantages, limitations, and considerations of these monitoring tools?
(3) What behaviors can be detected?
(4) How do these behaviors impact seniors’ health and well-being?

🔍 Key Highlights:
24 Monitoring Tools: We classified tools into four main types (questionnaires, self-reports, sensors, and third-party data) and analyzed their application in studying seniors’ behaviors.
45 Behavior Types: Comprehensive analysis of behaviors across four dimensions: physical, leisure, recreational, and social. Common activities like walking and gardening showed significant health benefits, such as reducing blood pressure and relieving stress.
Behavioral Influence Map: Based on 86 papers, we mapped the impacts of seven key behaviors (gardening, sedentariness, landscape viewing, dancing, biking, walking, singing) on seniors’ four health dimensions. Gardening demonstrated the most diverse effects (30 types: 21 positive, 9 negative), while singing and biking had the least.

💡 In the discussion:
We addressed the limitations of current methods across six dimensions: sample size, monitoring range, time cost, labor cost, quantity of information, and disturbing degree, highlighting opportunities for future interdisciplinary research.