A Smart Thermostat-Based Population-Level Behavioural Changes During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States: A Proposed Study

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the world and highlighted the inadequacies of public healthcare systems despite the availability of effective public health surveillance systems. The constraints caused by the pandemic had a great impact on behavioural markers such as physical, sedentary and sleep activity. In 2020, the United States (US) implemented the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) in some states for COVID-19 information searching, health risk behaviours and prevention practices. However, the BRFSS is limited by the quality of input data. When introduced, connected devices such as Fitbit were lauded as another best thing in data collection for research and faced challenges such as battery limitations and data quality. This proposed study will examine the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the population-level behavioural changes in the US using Zero-effort technology, NextGen IoT data sources (Donate your Data (DYD) from a smart thermostat company named ecobee), and cloud-based analytical infrastructure (Microsoft Azure). The proposed study will a) evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on household occupancy patterns and variations in the US; b) compute the sleep parameters (sleep time, wake up time, and sleep duration) and time spent in-house and out-of-the-house to explore the impact of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on household behaviours in the US.