Common multi-day rhythms in smartphone behavior
Abstract The idea that abnormal human activities follow multi-day rhythms is found in ancient beliefs on the moon to modern clinical observations in epilepsy and mood disorders. To explore multi-day rhythms in healthy human behavior our analysis includes over 300 million smartphone touchscreen inter...
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Nature Portfolio
2023-03-01
|
| Series: | npj Digital Medicine |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-023-00799-7 |
| Summary: | Abstract The idea that abnormal human activities follow multi-day rhythms is found in ancient beliefs on the moon to modern clinical observations in epilepsy and mood disorders. To explore multi-day rhythms in healthy human behavior our analysis includes over 300 million smartphone touchscreen interactions logging up to 2 years of day-to-day activities (N401 subjects). At the level of each individual, we find a complex expression of multi-day rhythms where the rhythms occur scattered across diverse smartphone behaviors. With non-negative matrix factorization, we extract the scattered rhythms to reveal periods ranging from 7 to 52 days – cutting across age and gender. The rhythms are likely free-running – instead of being ubiquitously driven by the moon – as they did not show broad population-level synchronization even though the sampled population lived in northern Europe. We propose that multi-day rhythms are a common trait, but their consequences are uniquely experienced in day-to-day behavior. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 2398-6352 |