In the project “Look! A healthy neighborhood”, we explore how a mobile app can be used to map neighborhood features and community resources with regards to physical and mental health, and feed these back into the physical and social experience in the neighborhood. The neighborhood Slotermeer in Amsterdam is used a pilot location for the project due to its repeated low scores on physical and mental health at the nationwide health scans.
The residents of Slotermeer have a key position in the design process of the application. Two large-scale studies were performed in the neighborhood by actively involving Slotermeer residents in revealing the factors that they found important regarding the health of their neighborhood. The result of these studies formed the basis for the various health indicators which were embedded into the Kijk! app.
This project is a collaboration between the Amsterdam University of Applied Science, two governmental health institutions, i.e., National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) and the Public Health Service of Amsterdam (GGD Amsterdam), local community development organization Eigenwijks, and the municipality of Amsterdam City-district New-West.
Further description of the tool can be found under here
The design process for the Kijk! Application is explained in detail in the following publication:
Cila, N., Jansen, G., Groen, M., Meys, W., den Broeder, L., & Kröse, B. (2016). Look! A Healthy Neighborhood: Means to Motivate Participants in Using an App for Monitoring Community Health. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 889-898). ACM.
