What are the links between stress and the area where we live, the places we frequent during the day, what we do there and with whom? In essence, these are the questions posed by the national survey called "FragMent" that the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (Liser) has just launched.

The project aims to "understand the impact of neighbourhood environments and daily activities on stress levels among Luxembourg residents". The scale of the project and the resources deployed make it the first of its kind in the country.

Participation à la carte

There are two conditions : you must be a resident of Luxembourg and be aged between 18 and 65. There are two ways of participating. The first is quick, by completing two online questionnaires that take less than 30 minutes each. The second, requiring more involvement, involves not only filling in these two questionnaires, but also participants agreeing to share part of their daily life and travel habits with Liser researchers, via their smartphone and a dedicated application.

Once they have registered, participants will have to answer half a dozen daily micro-surveys over a two-week period. The questions cover the activity in progress, the place where they are, their current state of mind and their perception of their environment at a given moment.

Stress in the voice

And that's not all. Again using the application, participants are asked to geolocate their smartphone and to leave short voice messages (around twenty seconds long) that will enable the researchers to analyse the degree of stress in the voice at the time the recording was made.

Other parameters collected include physical activity, sleep, and whether the person is alone or accompanied.

As the application is only available on Android, Liser will loan a device to people with an iPhone. The same applies to residents who do not have a smartphone and those who do not wish to use their own mobile phone.

The research institute promises that it will take no more than six minutes a day to use the app.

As an incentive, a lottery is being organised with prizes of €50 and €100 vouchers.

Risk factor

Liser is counting on a cohort of 2,000 participants. These volunteers, it explained, will "help political decision-makers, local organisations and citizens, during the collaborative work and dissemination phases of the results, to equitably reduce exposure to the factors that determine stress in public spaces".

Stress is presented as "a risk factor for 75% to 90% of illnesses, whether psychological, cognitive, skin, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, immune, respiratory, etc.". Now, "whether it's the area where we live or the places we visit regularly, our daily environments contribute to stress or, on the contrary, produce a calming effect".

International cooperation

Liser has surrounded itself with a pool of nine international partners for this EU-funded project. The Luxembourg Institute of Health is one of them.

The data obtained over the coming months will be analysed by a team of experts in epidemiology, psychology, geography, health, data science and mobility.

The title 'FragMent' chosen for this survey refers to the phenomenon of 'fragmentation', as geography researchers call it to define the fact that "our daily activities are increasingly fragmented in multiple locations and at different times of the day".

Read the original French-language version of this news report /