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Modeling behaviors and lifestyle with online and social data for predicting and analyzing sleep and exercise quality

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Abstract

While recent data studies have focused on associations between sleep and exercise patterns as captured by digital fitness devices, it is known that sleep and exercise quality are affected by a much broader set of factors not captured by these devices, such as general lifestyle, eating, and stress. Here, we conduct a large-scale data study of exercise and sleep effects through an analysis of 8 months of exercise and sleep data for 20 k users, combined with search query logs, location information and aggregated social media data. We analyze factors correlated with better sleep and more effective exercise, and confirm these relationships through causal inference analysis. Further, we build linear models to predict individuals’ sleep and exercise quality. This analysis demonstrates the potential benefits of combining online and social data sources with data from health trackers, and is a potentially rich computational benchmark for health studies. We discuss the implications of our work for individuals, health practitioners and health systems.

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Notes

  1. http://www.fitbit.com/.

  2. https://jawbone.com/up.

  3. http://misfit.com/.

  4. https://hello.is/.

  5. https://myvocabulary.com/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Tech, 266 Ferst Drive, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Mehrdad Farajtabar

  2. Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA, USA

    Emre Kıcıman & Ryen W. White

  3. Microsoft, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA, USA

    Girish Nathan

Authors
  1. Mehrdad Farajtabar
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  2. Emre Kıcıman
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  3. Girish Nathan
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  4. Ryen W. White
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Correspondence to Mehrdad Farajtabar.

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Conflict of interest

This work is funded 100% through the authors employment (a full-time internship for MF and full-time employment for the other authors) at Microsoft.

Research involving Human Participants

All user identifying information was anonymized. We did not examine search queries with personally-identifiable information or other sensitive information. All data access and analysis performed for this research was done in accordance with the published end-user license agreement, which was worded as follows: “By connecting to Microsoft Health you agree to allow Microsoft to share your data between Cortana and Microsoft Health, to provide valuable personal insights and recommendations to help you reach your fitness and wellness goals.” Visits to businesses were logged by Cortana to offer local services and is agreed to by users. Twitter data were not connected to specific users, but rather was based on publicly available tweets and were aggregated across many users who visited the business location. Our work was conducted offline, on data collected to support existing business operations, and did not influence the user experience. All data were anonymized and deidentified prior to analyses. Each user was represented by an anonymous identifier. We filtered search queries to only those matching a whitelist of keywords relevant to our study. The Ethics Advisory Committee at Microsoft Research considers these precautions sufficient for triggering the Common Rule, exempting this work from detailed ethics review.

Informed consent

Our data were collected between August 2015 and April 2016 and from individuals who agreed to link their Cortana data and Microsoft Health data (including Band device data) for use in generating additional insights or recommendations about their sleep or activity.

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Farajtabar, M., Kıcıman, E., Nathan, G. et al. Modeling behaviors and lifestyle with online and social data for predicting and analyzing sleep and exercise quality. Int J Data Sci Anal 8, 367–383 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41060-018-0136-8

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