Automatically captured sociability and sleep quality in healthy adults

Sleep and social interactions have been shown to have a considerable public health impact. However, little is known about how these affect each other in healthy individuals. This research is first to propose the exploration of the bidirectional relationship between technologically sensed sleep quality and quantified face-to-face social interactions. We detail a pilot study designed to study the relationship of sociability and sleep quality, both measured and perceived, of healthy adults. We capture real-world social interactions and measure sleep in a naturalistic setting using wireless sensing technologies. We find that it may not be the device-defined sleep quality (ZQ score) but our perceived sleep quality which affects our following day's sociability. Further, we also find perceived sleep quality is more strongly correlated to normalized ZQ scores than the actual scores. These intriguing insights raise several questions on how an individual's social life could be affected by sleep and indicate the usefulness of mobile sensing technologies in understanding public health phenomena.