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There may be a city that’s even more sleep deprived than “the city that never sleeps.”
The findings are from a vast new dataset released to The Wall Street Journal by Jawbone, the makers of the UP, a digitized wristband that tracks how its users move and sleep.
According to the data, the most well-rested city in the world is Melbourne. Residents of the Down Under city get an average of 6 hours and 58 minutes of sleep. The most sleep-deprived city is Tokyo. Residents of the high tech Japanese metropolis get only 5 hours and 44 minutes of shut-eye.
Parsed and organized by data scientists at Jawbone, the UP-delivered info offers a variety of surprising findings. Resident of New York, often called the “city that doesn’t sleep,” actually hit the hay earlier than people in Paris, Beijing, Moscow, Dubai, Tokyo and Madrid.
If critics are to be believed, the dataset might best be taken as fun anecdote — not as hard science.
Jim McDannald, health and fitness technology writer at The Wirecutter, recently told The New York Times that he had serious doubts about the accuracy of most digital fitness wristbands on the market. He claimed to have tested many of the most popular products, including UP, and said both movement and sleep tracking functions were highly inaccurate.
“Even a cheap pedometer is more accurate than these wristband trackers,” McDannald told the Times.
Accurate or not, the data does at least make for some attractive infographics. Interactive maps and the entirety of the UP dataset can be viewed on Jawbone’s blog.Brooks Hays
Agencies/Canadajournal
Contrast that graph with users in Orlando or Beijing, where there’s a less distinction between how users sleep on weekends and weekdays.