The study builds on CITY IN TIME, a publicly accessible digital platform commissioned by the Hong Kong Tourism Commission that reconstructs 44 iconic Hong Kong landmarks as they appeared between 1900 and 1970. The reconstructions were assembled from archival sources, including historical photographs, maps, and documentary records, and rendered as navigable three-dimensional environments built in the Unity game engine. Rather than offering static panoramas, the platform allows users to move through detailed streetscapes of a city that has largely vanished, encountering the shops, transport, and architecture of earlier eras at eye level and at walking pace.

The research team, led by Jingting Huang, Yifei Li, Richard William Allen, Jeffrey Shaw, and corresponding author Linyan Li, recruited older adults through community organizations and assigned participants to groups with differing levels of exposure to the virtual heritage environments. The experimental design was deliberately rigorous, capturing data before, during, and after the virtual experience. Physiological monitoring ran throughout each session, including electroencephalography to track brain activity, alongside measures of heart rate variability and electrodermal activity, both well-established indicators of stress and emotional arousal. Psychological assessments administered before and after the sessions measured memory recall, anxiety, mood, place attachment, and perceived social connection.

The results were consistent across both the biological and the self-reported data. Participants who experienced the historical environments showed enhanced memory recall, with the virtual streets acting as powerful cues for autobiographical memories. This effect aligns with a well-documented phenomenon in memory research known as the reminiscence bump, in which events from adolescence and early adulthood are recalled more vividly and frequently than experiences from other life periods. For many participants, the reconstructed landmarks fell squarely within that formative window, providing spatial scaffolding that helped them mentally time travel back to specific moments of their own lives.

The physiological traces told a parallel story. Electroencephalographic recordings revealed changes in relative power across frequency bands associated with relaxed, positive engagement, and the stress-linked measures of electrodermal activity indicated a calming effect during and after exposure. Trajectories of physiological and psychological responses were tracked across four assigned groups, and the between-group comparisons showed that the immersive heritage experience produced measurable benefits relative to control conditions. In practical terms, a session of walking through a digitally resurrected 1950s Hong Kong street functioned something like a relaxation intervention, lowering physiological stress markers while simultaneously lifting mood.

Semi-structured interviews conducted after the sessions added a qualitative dimension that the sensors could not capture. Participants described their experience of urban memory as multidimensional, encompassing both tangible places and intangible narratives. A reconstructed ferry pier was not merely a structure; it was the backdrop for stories of courtship, family outings, first jobs, and neighborhood friendships. Word frequency analysis of the interviews showed which digitally reconstructed landmarks resonated most strongly, and the perceptual patterns that emerged confirmed that the value of the virtual environments lay less in architectural fidelity alone and more in the personal and communal stories the places triggered.

The findings arrive at a moment when both of the forces at play are intensifying. Rapid urbanization worldwide continues to erase historic fabric, severing communities from the physical anchors of their collective memory. At the same time, populations are aging quickly, and social isolation and loneliness among older adults have been identified by major public health bodies as serious risks for mental and physical health, comparable in their impact to more traditional medical risk factors. Prior research has linked environmental factors, place attachment, and access to meaningful spaces with life satisfaction and lower rates of depressive symptoms in older populations, making the loss of familiar places a genuine well-being concern rather than a merely sentimental one.

Virtual reality has been explored before as a tool for older adults, including reminiscence therapy for people with cognitive impairment and nature-based virtual environments for stress reduction. What distinguishes the new work is its combination of a large, historically grounded, city-scale reconstruction with a multi-modal evaluation that spans brain activity, peripheral physiology, standardized psychometrics, and in-depth interviews. The authors also note that acceptance of immersive head-mounted displays among older adults, once considered a barrier, has been shown in earlier studies to be higher than commonly assumed when the technology is introduced carefully, and the technology acceptance and user experience ratings collected across the experimental groups in this study support that picture.

The researchers frame their results as evidence that urban heritage, even when the physical fabric is gone, can still safeguard collective memory and foster community well-being. Because the CITY IN TIME platform is publicly accessible and the approach is scalable, the authors argue that similar digital reconstructions could be created for other cities, offering a way to preserve layered histories while giving older residents an emotionally resonant resource for reminiscence, stress relief, and social interaction. The work also hints at broader applications, from intergenerational programs in which younger residents explore the same virtual streets alongside elders, to therapeutic settings where guided virtual heritage visits complement conventional care.

There are limits to what a single study can establish. The experimental data are not publicly available due to ethical restrictions, though de-identified or aggregated data may be requested from the corresponding author with a research proposal and data-use plan, and the participants were drawn from a specific urban population with specific memories of a specific city. The durability of the benefits beyond the immediate post-session period remains an open question, as does how the approach transfers to people whose formative years were spent elsewhere. Still, the convergence of physiological, psychological, and narrative evidence makes a compelling case that the past, once digitized with care, is not just an archive to be consulted but an environment to be inhabited, and that walking through it virtually can make the present measurably better for the people who remember it first.

Subject of Research: Immersive virtual heritage environments and well-being outcomes in older adults

Article Title: Revisiting the urban past virtually to enhance well-being for older adults

Article References: Huang, J., Li, Y., Allen, R. W., Shaw, J., & Li, L. (2026). Revisiting the urban past virtually to enhance well-being for older adults. Nature Cities. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-026-00523-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44284-026-00523-y

Keywords: virtual reality, urban heritage, older adults, collective memory, Hong Kong, well-being, reminiscence, stress reduction, social connectedness, digital reconstruction, Nature Cities, place attachment

The research, led by Leila Mardanian Dehkordi of the Nursing and Midwifery Care Research Center at Isfahan University of Medical Sciences in Iran, together with Mohammadreza Razeghi, Alireza Razeghi, and Samereh Abdoli of the University of Tennessee, examined the relationship between sense of belonging and diabetes self-management in adults with type 1 diabetes. While social support has been studied extensively in diabetes care, the investigators focused on a related but distinct construct: sense of belonging, defined as the subjective experience of being accepted, valued, and connected to others. It is not simply about how many people are around you, but whether you feel genuinely embraced by them.

To capture that experience, the team recruited 205 adults with type 1 diabetes through multistage cluster sampling from community healthcare centers in Isfahan, Iran. Participants completed two validated instruments: the Sense of Belonging Instrument, known as the SOBI, and the Diabetes Self-Management Questionnaire–Revised, or DSMQ-R. The SOBI distinguishes between two complementary dimensions. The first, SOBI-P, measures the psychological experience of belonging—the felt sense of acceptance and value. The second, SOBI-A, measures what researchers call antecedents of belonging: the concrete circumstances, such as social fit and shared characteristics with others, that make that psychological experience possible in the first place.

The DSMQ-R, meanwhile, breaks diabetes self-management into clinically meaningful domains: glucose management and monitoring, dietary control, physical activity, contact with physicians, and an overall self-management score. By pairing these two instruments, the researchers could ask a precise question: does feeling connected to others track with doing a better job of managing a demanding chronic illness?

The answer, on several fronts, was yes. Participants who reported a greater sense of belonging also reported better overall diabetes self-management. When the researchers unpacked the two dimensions of belonging separately, an interesting pattern emerged. The psychological experience of belonging—SOBI-P—was positively associated with glucose management and monitoring, dietary control, physician contact, and the overall self-management score. In other words, people who felt accepted and valued were more likely to check their sugars, watch their diets, and keep up with their doctors.

The antecedent dimension, SOBI-A, told a complementary story. It was associated with dietary control, physical activity, and overall self-management. This suggests that the concrete social conditions that enable belonging—having people around you with whom you share experiences and feel at ease—may translate into behavioral engagement, particularly in the domains of eating well and staying active. Both dimensions of belonging remained significantly associated with overall diabetes self-management in multiple regression analyses, indicating that the relationship held when accounting for other variables in the model.

Importantly, the researchers are careful about what the study does and does not show. The effect sizes they observed were modest, and because the design was cross-sectional—capturing a single moment in time—it cannot establish whether belonging drives better self-management, whether people who manage their diabetes well come to feel more connected, or whether both are shaped by some third factor such as depression, socioeconomic stability, or general health. Nor did the study find a significant association between either dimension of belonging and self-reported HbA1c, the laboratory measure of average blood sugar over the preceding months. Self-management behaviors and glycemic outcomes are related but not identical, and the path from feeling connected to lower HbA1c is clearly not a straight line.

Still, the theoretical grounding of the study gives the findings plausibility. Sense of belonging is a core element of self-determination theory, one of the most influential frameworks in motivational psychology, which holds that human beings have fundamental needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When the relatedness need is met, people are more internally motivated to pursue goals—including health goals. Living with type 1 diabetes, moreover, is often an isolating experience. Many adults describe hiding their condition, skipping insulin doses in social settings, or feeling misunderstood by friends and family who underestimate the disease’s demands. In that light, a felt sense of belonging could plausibly lower the emotional friction of daily self-care, making it easier to test glucose in public, ask for accommodations, or admit to a doctor that a regimen is slipping.

The clinical implications, though preliminary, are tangible. The authors suggest that strategies fostering belonging and meaningful social connections may complement existing diabetes self-management education and support programs. That could mean structured peer support groups, community-based programs for people with type 1 diabetes, or clinical workflows that screen for social isolation alongside HbA1c. It also resonates with a broader shift in chronic disease care toward recognizing psychosocial factors—loneliness, belonging, social integration—as legitimate targets of intervention rather than soft background variables. If the experience of being accepted and valued measurably tracks with the grit of daily diabetes work, then belonging is not a luxury; it is part of the treatment environment.

The study also carries a caution for how the field interprets such findings. Modest correlations in a single community sample of 205 adults in one Iranian city do not settle the question of causation, and self-reported self-management is an imperfect window into actual behavior. Future longitudinal and intervention studies will be needed to test whether deliberately cultivating belonging—through peer mentoring, group clinics, or community engagement—produces durable improvements in self-management and, ultimately, in glycemic control. Yet even with those caveats, the message is compelling in its simplicity: the drive to belong, so often treated as separate from medicine, may be quietly woven into the hardest work patients do every day. For adults carrying the constant cognitive load of type 1 diabetes, feeling seen and valued by others may be one of the quiet resources that keeps the counting, the injecting, and the monitoring going. Science is only beginning to measure how much that invisible connection matters—and this study suggests it matters more than we might think.

Subject of Research: The correlation between sense of belonging and diabetes self-management in adults with type 1 diabetes

Article Title: Correlation between sense of belonging and diabetes self-management among adults with type 1 diabetes

Article References: Mardanian Dehkordi, L., Razeghi, M., Razeghi, A., & Abdoli, S. (2026). Correlation between sense of belonging and diabetes self-management among adults with type 1 diabetes. BMC Endocrine Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12902-026-02581-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12902-026-02581-8

Keywords: type 1 diabetes, diabetes self-management, sense of belonging, social connectedness, psychosocial factors, BMC Endocrine Disorders, glucose monitoring, self-determination theory, HbA1c, peer support, chronic disease care, Iran