Health and the built environment in United States cities: measuring associations using Google Street View-derived indicators of the built environment

Abstract

The built environment is a structural determinant of health and has been shown to influence health expenditures, behaviors, and outcomes. Traditional methods of assessing built environment characteristics are time-consuming and difficult to combine or compare. Google Street View (GSV) images represent a large, publicly available data source that can be used to create indicators of characteristics of the physical environment with machine learning techniques. The aim of this study is to use GSV images to measure the association of built environment features with health-related behaviors and outcomes at the census tract level.