Movement Entropy in a Gardening Design Task as a Diagnostic Marker for Mental Disorders: Results of a Pilot Study

Sebastian Unger, Sebastian Appelbaum, Thomas Ostermann, Christina Niedermann, Christina Niedermann

2021

Abstract

Movement, actions, and intentions are important psychological skills in human behavior. Studies have shown correlations between movement activity and a variety of mental disorders. In this context, planning and designing of gardens and outdoor spaces as an intentional activity might play an important role as a marker for mental health. Thus, in this study, 16 subjects (8 female) aged between 19 and 60 were asked to do a gardening task in an experimentally constructed environment while their movement activity was recorded with a camera from a fixed viewpoint. Movement heatmaps and entropy then was calculated and correlated with mental state measured via the Global Severity Index (GSI) of the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI-18) questionnaire. After finding an optimal grid size of the heatmaps, we were able to find a moderate negative correlation of r = -0.463 between these quantities in an overall of both genders, explaining 21.4 % of variance. After considering the gender of the test group, a noticeable gender effect could be revealed. We found a significant interaction effect of entropy with gender meaning that a lower movement entropy in a gardening task correlates with a higher mental distress for men, but lower for women. Multivariate regression found that this model explained 77.44 % of variance (R = 0.88). Despite of these promising results, further investigations in this area should overcome some limitations in this pilot study in the field of position tracking and movement feature extraction.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Unger S., Appelbaum S., Ostermann T. and Niedermann C. (2021). Movement Entropy in a Gardening Design Task as a Diagnostic Marker for Mental Disorders: Results of a Pilot Study. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2021) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF; ISBN 978-989-758-490-9, SciTePress, pages 337-343. DOI: 10.5220/0010227203370343

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf21,
author={Sebastian Unger and Sebastian Appelbaum and Thomas Ostermann and Christina Niedermann},
title={Movement Entropy in a Gardening Design Task as a Diagnostic Marker for Mental Disorders: Results of a Pilot Study},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2021) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF},
year={2021},
pages={337-343},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010227203370343},
isbn={978-989-758-490-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2021) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF
TI - Movement Entropy in a Gardening Design Task as a Diagnostic Marker for Mental Disorders: Results of a Pilot Study
SN - 978-989-758-490-9
AU - Unger S.
AU - Appelbaum S.
AU - Ostermann T.
AU - Niedermann C.
PY - 2021
SP - 337
EP - 343
DO - 10.5220/0010227203370343
PB - SciTePress