Smartphone Mediated Tracking and Analysis of Sleep Patterns in Indian College Students

Abstract Sleep is one of the essential bio-makers for human health. Poor sleep is associated with reduced cognitive performance. With most smartphone users in India being college students, the focus is now on exploring smartphone usage’s impact on students’ sleep. Umpteen news articles in India have reported binge-watching, social media use during the night, and other mobile phone-related interruptions as causes of improper sleep and irregular sleep patterns. However, such studies may involve bias while self-reporting and are limited to a one-time exercise. To understand the reality, we need to accurately quantify the sleep duration, patterns, mobile usage before and after bedtime, number and duration of interruptions. In this first-of-its-kind study in India, we infer novel insights into the sleep patterns of a cohort of 40 college students. We implement a mobile sensing-based approach for the study by installing a custom-developed mobile app on all phones. We extract sleep activity and infer the sleep duration, bed-in and wake-up times, and interruption duration from the sensor data collected from the phone’s built-in sensors. The study brings about new insights into college student sleep patterns and, interestingly, shows that students have a regular sleep cycle and good sleep quality. Only one-fourth of the students revealed irregular sleep patterns, and we did not observe any mobile-related interruptions 30 min past bedtime.