Study aims to help older people

Older people living in cities could enjoy better quality of life thanks to new research that brings them together with the next generation of urban designers and charts their emotional responses to their surroundings.

How a city’s environment affects behaviour and mood will be explored in a study that will see older people connected to mobile neural imaging devices taking to the streets of east London.

The study - based in Hackney Wick - invites older residents of Hackney Wick to collaborate as co-researchers in identifying what makes for good, age-friendly design.

It is part of wider project called Mobility, Mood and Place, which aims to make pedestrian mobility easy, enjoyable and more meaningful for older people.

Tracking messages

Each device produces an electroencephalogram (EEG) - a recording of brain activity which tracks the messages that brain cells continually send to one another.

It does so by picking up small electrical impulses on the scalp.

The custom-built headsets help researchers locate an environment’s negative and positive ‘hot spots’ that may affect an older person’s emotional state and mobility.

As well as their use in Hackney Wick, the headsets are being used in carefully controlled experiments with older participants in Edinburgh.

Student outreach

Students from the University will work with small groups of older people in Hackney Wick to understand their experiences and memories of the area, using innovative methods including collaborative design and mobile neuro-imaging.

The locality has undergone huge transformation in recent years, most notably with the construction of the Olympic Park.

Another part of the wider Mobility, Mood and Place project will involve mapping ‘environmental histories’ of a group of older people from Scotland, to understand how the environments they have lived in throughout their lives influence their health and mobility in old age.

University partnership

Mobility, Mood and Place is a joint project that brings together experts from the University of Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt University, University of York and King’s College London.

Mood and emotional state affects people’s judgments and actions. Well-designed places with good ambience are more likely to engage us. Having the opportunity to relax in attractive and natural environments is likely to restore our ability to stay alert and be active in busy places. So we are looking at the emotional dimensions of a place like Hackney Wick to see and record measurable responses to different environments and how they combine to encourage active use.

Professor Ward Thompson and University of Edinburgh students conducted similar work last year in Manchester.

This is the first time the EEG headsets will be used as part of the project’s co-design work with older people resident in local communities.

Professor Ward Thompson recently received the European Council of Landscape Architecture award for Outstanding Researcher 2014.