Identifying Sleep-Deprived Authors of Tweets: Prospective Study

Social media data can be explored as a tool to detect sleep deprivation. First-year undergraduate students in their first quarter were invited to wear sleep-tracking devices (Basis; Intel), allow us to follow them on Twitter, and complete weekly surveys regarding their sleep.

This study aimed to determine whether social media data can be used to monitor sleep deprivation.

The sleep data obtained from the device were utilized to create a tiredness model that aided in labeling the tweets as sleep deprived or not at the time of posting. Labeled data were used to train and test a gated recurrent unit (GRU) neural network as to whether or not study participants were sleep deprived at the time of posting.

Results from the GRU neural network suggest that it is possible to classify the sleep-deprivation status of a tweet's author with an average area under the curve of 0.68.

It is feasible to use social media to identify students' sleep deprivation. The results add to the body of research suggesting that social media data should be further explored as a potential source for monitoring health.