Research team
Melanie Tomintz
Simon Hoermann
Nawam Karki
Maria C Vega Corredor
Merel Keijsers
Duration
2018-2020
Funding
Health Research Council 18/789
Project summary
To improve preventive health outcomes, a radical shift in thinking needs to be introduced to understand underlying causes of people’s subconscious behaviour to provide personalised digital health services in future; especially to support people most in need, eg. Māori. Currently, health data is mainly collected by using surveys which can lead to bias. The aim of this study was to build a multi-sensory environment that allowed us to measure people’s behavioural and psychophysiological reactions (eg. rise of heart rate, sweat) when placing them into different virtual environments using virtual reality technology and simulating different exposures, e.g. tobacco, different flavours of e-cigarette liquids, food, weather conditions, that evoked different subconscious reactions. This will create a new and novel dataset in New Zealand using smoking as a case study and will include e-cigarette smoking and Māori study groups, to help design innovative smoking intervention and cessation tools and policies.
Outputs
Tomintz M (2019). Vaping – novel data collection to add a piece to th puzzle. Annual Geospatial Symposium, showcase of GeoHealth Laboratory research. MOH Wellington, 8 April 2019.
Tomintz M., Vega-Corredor M., Hoermann S., and Karki N. (2019). Virtual Environments to Study Preventive Health Attitudes Case study “VAPING”. Geography seminar series. University of Canterbury. Christchurch, 15 April 2019.
Tomintz M., Karki N. Vega-Corredor M., And Hoermann S. (2019). Design and developmen of virtual environments to asses cravings related to vaping. HRSC Poster Evening, Christchurch, 20 August 2019.
Tomintz M., Vega-Corredor M., Hoermann S., and Karki N. (2019). Desinging virtual reality environments to study vapers behavioral and psychophysiological reaction in New Zealand. New Zealand Geospatial Research Conference. Queenstown, 18 September 2019.
