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How An Earthquake Will Mess Up Your Sleep: A Jawbone Chart

This article is more than 9 years old.

Northern California's worst earthquake in 25 years led to hundreds of injuries, plenty of property damage, and ... more than a million hours of lost sleep?

That's what a fascinating new Jawbone graphic suggests. Sunday morning's 6.0 magnitude earthquake had a measurable effect on Northern California residents' sleep — but there was a noticeable difference between people who live in Napa, near the epicenter of the earthquake, and people who live in Santa Cruz about 100 miles away.

Jawbone data scientists drew the data for their visualization from Jawbone's UP fitness tracker, a wristband that measures movement and sleep; according to Jawbone data scientists Eugene Mandel and Brian Wilt, they charted data compiled from thousands of users affected by the California earthquake, so their findings are "statistically significant."

(And while Jawbone's user base isn't necessarily representative of the general population, the impact of an earthquake on sleep is rather different than drawing out insights from Jawbone users and applying them to Californians' daily diet and movement; a natural disaster has a leveling effect on behavior.)

About 90% of UP users in the Bay area were asleep at the time of the earthquake, and the Jawbone graphic is cleverly drawn to show a spike at 3:20 a.m. — when the earthquake hit.

Nearly all of the UP users in Napa, Sonoma, Vallejo and Fairfield — which were within 15 miles of the earthquake's epicenter — suddenly woke up when the earthquake struck, Mandel writes. But the earthquake's impact on sleep diminished as Jawbone's data scientists looked further and further from the epicenter.

"In San Francisco and Oakland, slightly more than half (55%) woke up," Mandel added. "As we look even farther, the effect becomes progressively weaker — almost no UP wearers in Modesto and Santa Cruz (and others between 75 and 100 miles from the epicenter) were woken up by the earthquake, according to UP data."

About 140,000 people live in Napa County; 840,000 live in San Francisco County; 1.4 million in Sacramento County; and 1.6 million in Alamada County. Pro-rating the chart and Jawbone's statistics to all Bay Area residents suggests that the earthquake cost Californians well over 2 million hours of sleep on Sunday morning.

For example, the chart suggests that, on average, it took the 1.3 million San Francisco County and Alameda County residents who were woken up by the earthquake about 20 minutes to fall back asleep. That's more than 400,000 hours of lost sleep.

The lost sleep from the earthquake in Napa County alone — where almost half of UP users didn't go back to bed at all after the quake — likely amounts to more than 1 million hours by itself.

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