Daily space-time activities, multiple environmental exposures, and anxiety symptoms: A cross-sectional mobile phone-based sensing study

Background: Few mobility-based studies have investigated the associations between multiple environmental exposures, including social exposures, and mental health. Objective: To assess how exposure to green space, blue space, noise, air pollution, and crowdedness along people's daily mobility paths are associated with anxiety symptoms. Methods: 358 participants were cross-sectionally tracked with Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled mobile phones. Anxiety symptoms were measured at baseline using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) questionnaire. Green space, blue space, noise, and air pollution were assessed based on concentric buffers of 50 m and 100 m around each GPS point. Crowdedness was measured by the number of nearby Bluetooth-enabled devices detected along the mobility paths. Multiple linear regressions with full covariate adjustment were fitted to examine anxiety environmental exposures associations. Random forest models were applied to explore possible nonlinear associations and exposure interactions. Results: Regression results showed null linear associations between GAD-7 scores and environmental exposures. Random forest models indicated that GAD-7-environment associations varied nonlinearly with exposure levels. We found a negative association between green space and GAD-7 scores only for participants with moderate green space exposure. We observed a positive association between GAD-7 scores and noise levels above 60 dB and air pollution concentrations above 17.2 mu g m(-3). Crowdedness was positively associated with GAD-7 scores, but exposure-response functions flattened out with pronounced crowdedness of > 7.5. Blue space tended to be positively associated with GAD-7 scores. Random forest models ranked environmental exposures as more important to explain GAD-7 scores than linear models. Conclusions: Our findings indicate possible nonlinear associations between mobility-based environmental exposures and anxiety symptoms. More studies are needed to obtain an in-depth understanding of underlying anxiety-environment mechanisms during daily life.

Automated summary

This study found possible nonlinear associations between mobility-based environmental exposures and anxiety symptoms. Green space was negatively associated with anxiety symptoms for participants with moderate exposure. Noise levels above 60 dB and air pollution concentrations above 17.2 µg/m³ were positively associated with anxiety symptoms. Crowdedness was positively associated with anxiety symptoms, but the effect diminished with higher levels of crowdedness. Blue space tended to be positively associated with anxiety symptoms.