The built environment and health: introducing individual space-time behavior.
Many studies have examined the relationship between the built environment and health. Yet, the question of how and why the environment influences health behavior remains largely unexplored. As health promotion interventions work through the individuals in a targeted population, an explicit understanding of individual behavior is required to formulate and evaluate intervention strategies. Bringing in concepts from various fields, this paper proposes the use of an activity-based modeling approach for understanding and predicting, from the bottom up, how individuals interact with their environment and each other in space and time, and how their behaviors aggregate to population-level health outcomes.
Saarloos
Dick
D
Centre for the Built Environment and Health, School of Population Health, The University of Western Australia, M707, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia. dick.saarloos@uwa.edu.au
Kim
Jae-Eun
JE
Timmermans
Harry
H
D004777:Environment; D015438:Health Behavior; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D009765:Obesity / Q000209:etiology; D050177:Overweight / Q000209:etiology