Hearts and Politics: Metrics for Tracking Biorhythm Changes during Brexit and Trump

TL;DR

This study analyzes how major political and cultural events impact collective biological rhythms by tracking health data from thousands of users, revealing event-specific disruptions in sleep, activity, and heart rate patterns.

Contribution

The paper introduces new metrics for assessing not just the volume but also the synchronicity and periodicity of bio-signals during significant societal events.

Findings

Brexit and Trump's election caused longer-term disruptions in biological rhythms.

Christmas and New Year's Eve showed short-term effects on bio-signals.

Metrics can distinguish between different types of societal event impacts.

Abstract

Our internal experience of time reflects what is going in the world around us. Our body's natural rhythms get disrupted for a variety of external factors, including exposure to collective events. We collect readings of steps, sleep, and heart rates from 11K users of health tracking devices in London and San Francisco. We introduce measures to quantify changes in not only volume of these three bio-signals (as previous research has done) but also synchronicity and periodicity, and we empirically assess how strong those variations are, compared to random expectation, during four major events: Christmas, New Year's Eve, Brexit, and the US presidential election of 2016 (Donald Trump's election). While Christmas and New Year's eve are associated with short-term effects, Brexit and Trump's election are associated with longer-term disruptions. Our results promise to inform the design of new ways of monitoring population health at scale.