New York City Does In Fact Sleep

Brian Wilt, a data scientist at Jawbone, the company behind many fitness trackers, aggregated sleeping patterns of people across the world to see how people's sleeping cycles compare.

1 minute read

August 22, 2014, 6:00 AM PDT

By Maayan Dembo @DJ_Mayjahn

Using data from tens of thousands of UP fitness trackers, Wilt compiled tens of thousands of people's sleeping habits and exercise patterns in each major city in the United States (and around 5,000 in every international city). Among large cities, New York City, a city known for never sleeping, is actually the first to go to sleep. In addition, the most sleep deprived residents live in Tokyo, where UP wearers get an average of 5 hours and 44 minutes.

When expanding the data set to small cities though, the earliest sleepers are residents of Brisbane, Australia, with an average bed time around 10:57 pm, but the latest to bed are still Muscovites, with an average bed time around 12:46pm.

The data is a bit skewed though, as most average person do not care to wear an $80 fitness tracking device. Wilt's analysis can also be considered in comparison to analysis by Nate Silver in April on sleeping patterns (that study relied on data from the American Community Survey).

FULL STORY: New York is the city that goes to bed at a completely reasonable hour

Wednesday, August 20, 2014 in Vox

Social / Demographics World Sleeping big data Jawbone

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