Sidewalks, single-lane roads and street signs could all be part of the path to a community’s mental and physical health, for better or worse, according to a new University of Maryland-led study. The research analyzed Google Street View images of diverse regions of the United States to correlate elements of the built environment to health behaviors and a range of diseases. The findings were published last month in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. "Our results suggest neighborhood walkability and urban development are connected with lower chronic disease, better mental health and reduced smoking, while single lane roads, which are an indicator of less urban development, are associated with higher levels of chronic disease,” said Quynh Nguyen, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UMD’s School of Public Health. Nguyen’s interdisciplinary research team, including graduate students from the School of Public Health and Department of Computer Science, manually annotated 18,700 images to create a computer vision model that recognized the built environment features used in the project. They then created an interactive geoportal where people can see the prevalence of those built environment features on a map of the United States.
