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 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.