gms | German Medical Science

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.