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Maintaining mental well-being in urban built environments with the help of technology in cities is a huge challenging trend, especially with the increasing number of people living in cities. Nowadays, urban life style has raised the risk of anxiety and mood disorders by 21% and 39% respectively. This paper aims at investigating the relationship between several attributes of the urban built environment with mental health and raising the issue of how mental health can be improved through urban design. Basically, mental health depends on human inner feelings and emotions reacting from surrounding environments. The study is based on analysing the individual experience of people and their lifestyle in several neighbourhoods of Damietta City, Egypt by using Hamilton Depression Scale as an instrument to evaluate the severity of depressive symptoms. The attributes of the built environment in those neighbourhoods are investigated using geographic information systems (GIS), on a sample of 445 individuals distributed in four different city areas. The socio-economic characteristics, built-up attributes and results from the depressive symptoms are analysed and compared in the four areas. A positive relationship has been detected between some attributes of the urban built environment and the severity of the depressive symptoms, emphasising the possibility of improving open public spaces and producing psychologically healthy cities., IS THIS THE REAL WORLD? Perfect Smart Cities vs. Real Emotional Cities. Proceedings of REAL CORP 2019, 24th International Conference on Urban Development and Regional Planning in the Information Society, 227-236

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is associated with cognitive dysfunction in clinic-based studies. The risk could be attributed to factors such as antiviral medications, substance abuse, or coincidental infection.The aim was to evaluate cognitive function in relation to HCV antibody titers in a community-based sample of asymptomatic individuals at low risk for substance abuse.Adults were ascertained from a community in Mansoura, Egypt, where HCV is endemic (n = 258). Cognitive performance was evaluated using the Arabic version of the Penn Computerized Neurocognitive Battery. Substance abuse and psychopathology were also assessed. Antibodies to HCV and Toxoplasma gondii (TOX), a common protozoan that can affect cognition, were estimated using serological IgG assays.The prevalence of HCV and TOX infection was 17.6% and 52.9%, respectively. HCV antibody titers were significantly associated with worse function in four cognitive tests for accuracy and three tests for speed, after adjusting for covariates (p.05, beta coefficients, 2.1-3.2). TOX antibody titers were associated with impaired accuracy in one test.The association between HCV antibody titers and cognitive impairment is not mediated by antiviral treatment or substance abuse in this sample. Whether HCV has a causal role in the cognitive dysfunction should be investigated.