Author: Noon Systems Corporation — Applied Field Institute, San Antonio, Texas · Correspondence: hello@noon.bio Version: 2.0 (preprint / framework paper) — Sensorial Choice, evolving v1.0 (Sensorial Performance Score, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20993533) · License: CC BY 4.0 · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21334937
Status note. This is a framework and position paper. It proposes a measurement instrument and its evidence basis, and it pre-specifies a validation program. It does not report validated outcomes, and the Sensorial Choice Score is not a medical or diagnostic device. Environmental health relationships cited here are, with few exceptions, associations from observational and short-term experimental studies; they are described as such throughout.
The places people live measurably affect sleep, cardiovascular function, cognition, and stress; that much is well established. The open problem is resolution: a person's biology is now measured in fine detail through wearables and biobanks, while their environment is still assigned at neighborhood-to-city scale, which blurs it. The Sensorial Choice Score closes that gap. It characterizes a single property's environment across six channels— five evidence-mapped (Air, Light, Noise, Thermal, Nature) plus a candidate Microbiome channel— at the resolution of the dwelling itself, so it can be paired over time with the same occupant's biology. The environmental half already operates: any U.S. address returns a property-level reading, and a design-build practice records dated, field-measured changes to real sites. The human pairing is a pre-registered within-person (n-of-1) program that has not yet run; this paper reports no health outcomes. Sensorial Choice is offered as an open instrument for one question— for a given property and a given person, does improving the environment measurably improve the body that lives in it?
Keywords: exposome; environmental health; greenspace; circadian; soundscape; built environment; sensory ecology; n-of-1; property-resolution exposure; affordance; agency.
This framework was first developed under the name Sensorial Performance (v1.0), on a single premise from environmental epidemiology: that measurable features of a place— its air, light, sound, thermal range, and biological richness— are associated with how the human body attends, recovers, and functions. That premise still holds, and it remains the reason the work matters.
But "performance" names a downstream effect— a change in the person— which can only be shown with human data this record does not yet have. What the instrument actually reads today is upstream and observable: the range of health-relevant conditions a place makes available. A parking lot offers one. A living place offers many— shade or sun, still or moving water, quiet or birdsong, ground to walk or ground to rest on. In ecological psychology these are called affordances: the actions and states a place offers a body. Sensorial Choice names that— how much health-relevant option a place gives back— rather than the effect it is hypothesized to produce.
The reframing is an evolution, not a repudiation; it carries three things the first name held only implicitly.
Cultural heritage. Options are not universal. The affordances that matter are the ones a people already share with their ground— the plants, animals, water, and practices native to a place and its community. The instrument reads a site for its own heritage rather than against a fixed template, which makes the construct culturally adaptive by design.
Agency. Research on self-determination links well-being to having real, meaningful options, not just pleasant surroundings. "Choice" names that plainly; "performance" left it implicit.
Resilience. A body— or the land around it— with more options absorbs a shock and keeps working. Optionality and resilience are the same thing at two scales.
This leaves performance and outcomes their proper place: the evidentiary layer. They are the human effects Sensorial Choice is hypothesized to produce, and that an accumulating record— gathered under the research-ethics oversight described in §4.3— is built to test. The environmental half of the framework is measurable now; the human half is an open research program, stated as such. This version accordingly supersedes v1.0 in name and framing while preserving its instrument, channels, and validation design unchanged.
The case that environment shapes human function is, in its broad strokes, well supported. Residential greenness is associated with lower all-cause mortality in pooled longitudinal data (Rojas-Rueda et al., 2019). Evening light exposure suppresses melatonin and degrades sleep and next-morning alertness under controlled conditions (Chang et al., 2015; Cajochen et al., 2022), while morning bright light advances circadian phase and improves mood (Crowley & Eastman, 2015). Road-traffic noise is associated with ischemic heart disease in WHO-grade systematic review (WHO, 2018; Münzel et al., 2018). Elevated indoor CO₂ and particulate matter measurably slow cognitive performance, and reducing indoor PM2.5 via filtration lowers blood pressure in a randomized crossover trial (Allen et al., 2016; Brugge et al., 2025). Natural soundscapes reduce stress and improve affect in meta-analysis (Buxton et al., 2021). Time in nature is associated with self-reported health and well-being above a threshold dose (White et al., 2019), and acute nature exposure reduces rumination with corresponding changes in prefrontal activity (Bratman et al., 2015) — building on the founding observation that a natural hospital-window view accompanied faster surgical recovery (Ulrich, 1984).
What the field lacks is not evidence that environment matters, but resolution. The exposome literature explicitly identifies an asymmetry: internal biological state is measured at high individual resolution, while external environmental exposure is assigned coarsely and inferred rather than measured (the asymmetry framed across exposome reviews; Snyder-lab personal-exposome work shows two people in the same neighborhood carry sharply different real exposures — Jiang et al., 2018). Greenspace exposure assigned from satellite indices at the neighborhood scale carries documented misclassification on the order of tens of percent (Jimenez et al., 2022). The strongest "before-and-after" intervention evidence — greening of vacant urban lots improving residents' mental health (South et al., 2018) — is neighborhood-clustered and self-reported.
Sensorial Choice is a response to this resolution problem. It characterizes the environment at the scale at which people actually live — the property and the dwelling — and it is built to be joined to the same person's continuously measured biology over time. The unit of analysis is not a census tract but a parcel and an occupant.
Sensorial Choice is not introduced here in the abstract; its environmental half already runs. Two existing systems supply it:
parcel-scale environmental reading drawn from public datasets — soil survey (USDA), terrain and hydrography (USGS), climate (NOAA / Open-Meteo), flood exposure (FEMA), and observed biodiversity (iNaturalist) — and renders per-channel values immediately. This is the "estimated, no-hardware" path of §3, operating today across thousands of properties.
it alters them, and records the alteration. Each project — a residential bioswale retrofit (Alamo Heights, 2024), a hand-cast 28-foot concrete water feature, fountains and biochar soil work at a transitional-housing village — is a dated environmental intervention with field measurement (infiltration, soil organic matter, shade temperature, captured volume, plant survival). This is the scarce ingredient most environmental-health programs lack and cannot cheaply manufacture: a continuous stream of real, dated, property-level natural experiments.
The contribution of this paper is therefore not to argue that the environment should be measured — that half is operating — but to specify how the operating environmental record is paired with the same occupants' biology, and to pre-register the test that turns association into within-person evidence.
Sensorial Choice decomposes a property's sensory environment into six channels, each selected because it maps to a distinct, documented human-outcome literature and to a distinct measurement path.
| Channel | Representative metrics | Associated human outcome | Evidence strength |
|---|---|---|---|
| Air | CO₂, PM2.5 | cognitive performance; blood pressure | strong |
| Light | daytime illuminance/spectrum; nighttime light | circadian phase; sleep; mood | strong |
| Noise | day/night sound level (Lden) | blood pressure; sleep quality | strong |
| Thermal | temperature, humidity (esp. sleeping environment) | sleep efficiency | moderate |
| Nature | vegetation index, canopy, visible greenery, access | stress; well-being; recovery | moderate |
| Microbiome (candidate) | environmental biodiversity; soil/vegetation contact | immune and mental-health pathways | emerging — not yet co-equal |
"Strength" is reported honestly: Air, Light, and Noise rest on controlled human trials and WHO-grade reviews; Thermal and Nature on consistent but largely observational or short-term experimental evidence; Microbiome on a mechanistically plausible but still-maturing literature (the "old friends" / biodiversity hypothesis; Hanski et al., 2012; Rook, 2013) — it is included as a candidate channel under investigation, not a co-equal measurement target, named to be explicit about intended scope rather than to claim parity with the established channels. The framework does not weight channels equally or treat all evidence as equivalent; it makes the evidentiary status of each channel explicit so that downstream use can be appropriately cautious.
This channel set is deliberately not a list of landscape features. It is a list of the pathways through which a place reaches a nervous system. A property's soil, hydrology, planting, and shade are inputs to these channels (chiefly Nature, Microbiome, and Thermal), not the channels themselves.
Sensorial Choice is not the first attempt to score the health quality of a place, and it does not replace the existing ones. Building-certification systems (WELL, LEED) and biophilic-design rubrics assess a structure against design checklists; the restorative-environments literature (Attention Restoration Theory, Stress Recovery Theory) supplies much of the mechanistic basis cited above. Sensorial Choice differs on the three axes that the exposure-resolution problem of §1 demands: (1) resolution — it measures a specific occupied property and dwelling, not a building's design intent or a neighborhood index; (2) temporality — it is a re-measured longitudinal time series tied to dated interventions, not a one-time certification; and (3) pairing — it is built from the outset to be joined to the same occupants' biology, where certification schemes stop at the building. A WELL-certified building still has an occupant whose measured biology is unknown — which is precisely the gap Sensorial Choice exists to close.
Sensorial Choice is, first, a set of per-channel raw measurements in physical units, with timestamps and source — the scientific content lives there. A composite 0–100 is offered only as a provisional, illustrative communication device for non-technical use; it is explicitly not a validated index and not the unit of analysis. Three design commitments govern the method.
3.1 Source-agnostic measurement (sensors optional). Each channel value carries an explicit source and fidelity. A channel may be populated by (a) estimated values derived from public data (e.g., vegetation indices, modeled traffic-noise surfaces, climate normals, land-cover); (b) self-reported occupant assessment; or (c) sensor measurement (e.g., a CO₂/PM2.5 monitor, a light or sound meter). Most properties are scored from estimated values requiring no hardware; sensor nodes exist primarily to calibrate the public-data estimate so that the hardware-free score becomes trustworthy at scale. This makes the instrument deployable to many properties while reserving direct measurement for the calibration set.
3.2 Raw values are retained. The composite 0–100 score is a communication device; the underlying per-channel raw values (in physical units, with timestamps and source) are retained, because validation and any causal analysis must operate on raw channel values, not on a lossy composite.
3.3 Honesty about the composite. The composite weighting is, at this stage, a proposed aggregation, not an empirically validated index. We make no claim that a given composite score corresponds to a specific quantitative health outcome. The composite's role is triage and communication; the scientific content lives in the per-channel values and their longitudinal relationship to biology.
The framework is only as good as the test it invites. We pre-specify a within-person design rather than a cross-sectional one, because the central threat to environment-health inference is not measurement but causal identification — self-selection (healthier or wealthier people occupy greener, quieter homes) and reverse causation (Besser et al., 2021).
4.1 Design. Aggregated n-of-1 (single-subject / one-person-trial) design (Schork, 2015). For one consenting occupant of one property, a single environmental channel is altered in a dated, controlled intervention (e.g., an ABA introduction of HEPA air filtration on the Air channel), while all other channels are held constant. The primary outcomes are objective, wearable-derived markers validated against reference instruments: nocturnal heart-rate variability and resting heart rate (research-grade in consumer wearables; Dial et al., 2025) and sleep/wake-derived sleep efficiency (actigraphy-class; sleep staging is explicitly excluded as not validated). Each block's primary metric and expected direction are pre-registered before data collection.
4.2 The paired record. The unit produced is a paired land–human record: a property's per-channel environmental time series and the same occupant's biological time series on a shared clock, with dated intervention markers. This pairing — multi-domain environment at property resolution joined to the same individual's continuous biology across real interventions — is, to our knowledge, not held by any existing dataset, precisely because of the resolution asymmetry described in §1.
4.3 Scaling. The first node is the author (a single subject, a single property), which collapses identity, consent, and multi-tenant complexity to a tractable case and exercises the full instrument. Generalization to additional subjects proceeds under a consented residency model with research-ethics oversight (a commercial IRB) and privacy protections consistent with contemporary consumer-health-data standards.
reports no paired outcome data.
residual confounding is plausible throughout the environmental-health evidence base.
data.
cognition, or cardiovascular markers in published literature; it does not treat, cure, or prevent any condition, and it operates within a general-wellness, non-medical frame.
candidate), and the framework is written to keep that unevenness visible rather than to flatten it.
The Sensorial Choice Score is an attempt to give a well-supported but coarsely-measured idea — that the environment shapes the body — the resolution it has been missing: the property, the dwelling, the individual, over time. It is offered openly, with its evidence basis itemized and its validation pre- specified, in the hope that property-resolution environment data and continuous human-biology data can finally be measured together, on the same person, across real change.
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Suggested citation: Noon Systems Corporation (2026). Sensorial Choice Score: A Property-Resolution Framework for Measuring How Built and Ecological Environments Shape Human Performance. Noon Systems Corporation. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20993533