The next revolution in personal health may be the little band that tracks your steps, reports TIME.
The most valuable analysis comes when researchers are able to draw on a wide pool of data. And the growing ubiquity of fitness and activity trackers has made that pool into an ocean. It’s also caused some worries–the IT security firm Symantec reported in June that fitness trackers were often vulnerable to hacking. But the data keep flowing. Jawbone users around the world have recorded more than 130 million nights of sleep–which, as the company’s vice president of data, Monica Rogati, notes, technically makes it the biggest sleep study in the world–as well as more than 1.6 trillion steps and 180 million items of food. “You take all that data, and you can see interesting patterns emerge,” she says.
For example, Rogati knows that in the U.S., people in Southern states move the least. She knows that New Yorkers have a huge swing in sleep time between the weekdays and the weekends, whereas people in Orlando–a city well stocked with retirees–get similar amounts of sleep throughout the week. During the 2013 Super Bowl, which went down to the wire, she saw sleep numbers drop nationwide–but not during the 2014 Super Bowl, a blowout that many people tuned out early in the night. She can actually see the passage of Ramadan, a month when observant Muslims fast throughout the day, in a Middle Eastern city like Dubai. “People become less active during the day and sleep more, essentially become nocturnal,” she says. “The data tell you something about the signature of the city.”
