Developing an Application in the Forest for New Tourism Post COVID-19 -Experiments in Oku-Nikko National Park

ABSTRACT

Tourism, which has developed in line with the development of transport, has had to undergo major changes. As the push for SDGs spreads across the world, and for safe travel post-COVID-16, environmentally friendly smallgroup tourism is being promoted. It would be beneficial if the smartphones, which is used daily lives, could be useful in the nature for small groups of novice walkers to walk safety and knowing some new information about the area. However, the signal conditions are not always perfect in forests. Therefore, we have developed a smartphone application using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons equipped with solar panels in Nikko National Park in Japan. Japan has long had the concept of forest bathing. Walking in the forest is told to have positive effects on the body and in the mind. We tried to clarify one of effects of forest bathing by measuring brain waves. We measured the effects of walking in nature by conducting simple EEG measurements while walking and measuring the degree of relaxation in the forest in 2021. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.