Purpose of review 

Environmental factors such as climate, urbanicity, and exposure to nature are becoming increasingly important influencers of mental health. Incorporating data gathered from real-life contexts holds promise to substantially enhance laboratory experiments by providing a more comprehensive understanding of everyday behaviors in natural environments. We provide an up-to-date review of current technological and methodological developments in mental health assessments, neuroimaging and environmental sensing.

Recent findings 

Mental health research progressed in recent years towards integrating tools, such as smartphone based mental health assessments or mobile neuroimaging, allowing just-in-time daily assessments. Moreover, they are increasingly enriched by dynamic measurements of the environment, which are already being integrated with mental health assessments. To ensure ecological validity and accuracy it is crucial to capture environmental data with a high spatio-temporal granularity. Simultaneously, as a supplement to experimentally controlled conditions, there is a need for a better understanding of cognition in daily life, particularly regarding our brain's responses in natural settings.

Summary 

The presented overview on the developments and feasibility of “real-life” approaches for mental health and brain research and their potential to identify relationships along the mental health-environment-brain axis informs strategies for real-life individual and dynamic assessments.

Read more here in Current Opinion in Psychiatry. 

Are all my details visible to other users?

Yes, most of your information is visible to all users of the app. All the information in the category "MY DAY" is NOT visible as well as the information about functions of spots (e.g. work, home,...) and the information regarding alcohol, drugs and medication.

With StreetMind you can contribute to a better understanding of how environmental factors like urbanicity or climate change influence how individuals across Europe and the world feel, act and behave. Make up your mind together with fellow citizens and scientists, and share your daily experiences of your surroundings and the environment you live, work, and interact in. How do you feel in certain places? Is it safe? Is it crowded? Do you feel particularly happy or stressed in a particular area? Interact with other people, feel empowered and inspired by a community of fellow citizens and help to make people aware of and identify things that can reduce the impact of significant environmental challenges. Each experience becomes part of a more extensive experience network across the globe. 

StreetMind is part of the research project environMENTAL funded by the European Union to address the question: How can we reduce the negative impact of significant environmental challenges on our well-being?

How do environmental factors affect you, as a European citizen, during your life in terms of health and well-being, cognition and behavior? What are important risk- and resilience factors in your environment that influence your mental well-being?

Join our community of citizen scientists!

What moves you in your daily life? How do you feel, think and act in your environment? How do your daily experience influence your well-being? Streetmind is part of a EU-HORIZON (environMENTAL) funded research project investigating the impact of major envrionemtnal challenges on our mental well-being. We are particular interested in how we all, as citizens, are impacted by climate, pollution, urbanicity, regional socioeconomic conditions, as well as the Covid19 pandemic. 

We want you to share your experiences in daily life with us and the community to find out more about places and areas in Europe and abroad. Where do people spent most of the times of their days and how they like it there? For this, we developed the App StreetMind (Android; iOS) and a StreetMind Survey, based on citizen science principles (research for the people, with the people, or by the people).