Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Dec 11, 2023
Date Accepted: Jul 10, 2024
Do Individuals React to Air Pollution Information in Exercise Behavior? Evidence from Wearable and Mobile Devices
ABSTRACT
Background:
Physical exercise and air pollution exposure have counteracting effects on individuals’ health outcomes. Knowledge on individuals’ real time exercise behavior response to different pollution information sources remains inadequate.
Objective:
This study aims to examine the extent to which individuals avoid polluted air during exercise activities, in response to different air pollution information sources.
Methods:
We used data on individuals’ exercise behaviors captured by wearable and mobile devices in 83 Chinese cities over a two-year time span. We further augmented the exercise behavior data with air pollution information that includes city-hourly level measures of AQI and PM2.5 concentration (in µg/m3), and weather data that include city-hourly level measures of air temperature (degree Celsius), dew point (degree Celsius), wind speed (m/s), wind direction (degrees), etc. We used a linear panel fixed effect model to estimate individuals’ exercise averting behaviors (i.e., running exercise distance at individual-hour, city-hour, or city-day levels), and validated the effect using endogenous treatment effect model and regression discontinuity method. We examined if alternative air pollution information sources moderate (i.e., substitute or complement) the role of mainstream air pollution indicators.
Results:
Our results show that individuals exhibit a reduction of running exercise behaviors by about 0.50km (or 7.5% reduction) during instances of moderate to severe air pollution, and there is no causal evidence of reduced distances in instances of light air pollution. Further, individuals’ exercise averting behaviors to mainstream air pollution information are heightened by different alternative information sources such as social connections and social media user-generated content about air pollution.
Conclusions:
Our results highlight the complementary role of different alternative information sources of air pollution in inducing individuals’ averting behaviors, and the importance of employing different information channels to increase public awareness beyond the official air pollution alerts.
Citation
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Copyright
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