# Comprehensive perceptions at the interface between health and environment: Applications models with a citizen science tool

## TL;DR

This paper introduces StreetMind, a digital platform that combines personal experiences with environmental data to better understand mental health and its connection to surroundings.

## Contribution

The novel contribution is a citizen science platform that integrates subjective mental health experiences with objective environmental data to map health–environment interactions.

## Key findings

- StreetMind collected data from over 1,000 users, showing the platform's feasibility and robustness.
- The platform successfully links personal perceptions with environmental metrics to identify factors affecting mental well-being.
- It enables the creation of dynamic health–environment spaces for public health applications.

## Abstract

Lived experience – how individuals perceive and interact with their environment – plays a central role in understanding mental health. Yet, insights into this first-person perspective, including subjective thoughts, emotions, and socio-contextual influences, remain limited in current research approaches.

To address this gap, we developed StreetMind, a scalable, secure, and user-friendly digital citizen science platform grounded in a psycho-sociogeographic framework. The platform collects self-reported data on individuals’ activity spaces through a mobile app and web interface, capturing location visits, travel routes, and daily experiences. These subjective reports are combined with objective real-time health, environmental, and sociocultural data to generate integrated community “footprints.”

Initial usage data (N = 1,010 for location and route entries; N = 509 for daily experiential data) demonstrate the platform’s structural robustness and functional feasibility. StreetMind enables classification of daily experiences by linking personal perceptions with contextual environmental data. This integration facilitates the identification and quantification of key environmental and psychosocial factors associated with mental well-being.

StreetMind offers a novel, data-rich mapping of health–environment interactions by merging individual lived experience with environmental metrics. This approach supports the creation of dynamic “health–environment spaces” and holds promise for informing public health strategies and advancing precision mental health care.