PUREmotion: Understanding the Impact of Highway Construction on People’s Wellbeing

Planned disruptions such as highway construction typically have negative impact on the health & wellbeing of people living in the surrounding communities due to increased air and noise pollution as well as inconveniences such road closures. Further, these communities typically tend to have low socio-economic status with high unemployment rate and limited resources (Environmental Justice Communities). The goal of this paper is to understand this impact via a smartphone app called PUREmotion providing ecological momentary assessment. We describe the deployment of PUREmotion in a four-month study with people living in the vicinity of a major construction project (C70 project) in North Denver, Colorado. The PUREmotion app is built based on the results of several focus groups and three rounds of usability study with people from these communities. We deployed the PUREmotion app over two time periods of six weeks each with about 100 community participants in each time period. In this paper, we report on our experience of these deployments and provide a detailed analysis of the data we collected to assess the impact of construction on health and wellbeing of the people. Our findings show that living near such construction projects has a direct (negative) impact on people’s wellbeing due to air pollution, bad odor, increased noise, and disruptions in daily commutes.