A Socio-Technical System to Understand and Mitigate The Negative Impacts of Planned Disruptions on People’s Well-being

Abstract

Planned disruption events such as highway construction typically span a relatively longer period of time and hence have negative impact on the health and wellbeing of people living in the surrounding communities. Further, these communities tend to have low socio-economic status with high unemployment rate and limited resources (Environmental Justice Communities). The goal of this dissertation is to understand and mitigate the negative impacts of planned disruption projects via a socio-technical system linking data from smartphone apps integrated with existing air quality and transportation APIs. Our focus in this project is on a highway expansion construction project in North Denver, USA (the C70 Project) and its surrounding communities. We started by designing an developing a smartphone app called PureMotion in a three-round usability study with community members from the affected area. After that we deployed PureMotion over two cohorts spanning for four months in total (two month each) and reported results from the analysis done on the data collected. Finally we designed, developed and deployed two intervention apps, PureNav and PureConnect, that contributed in helping community members mitigate the top issues that we have learned from the first two studies, transportation and lack of information