It’s not unusual to hear people complaining about tiredness multiple times a day, but why? Sleep is fundamental to human health, but because it’s so private, there are few tools for measuring how much sleep everyone is getting at scale. Existing methods use time diaries, sleep surveys, sleep laboratories or, more recently, wearable technology to measure sleep. But none of these approaches is ready to tackle a global sleep-loss pandemic.
A Monash University study asked a different question: could the massive data we all generate when connecting to and disconnecting from the internet help researchers understand sleep?
As internet addresses go online and offline through the day, they track the daily human behavioural cycle: a trough in the early hours, followed by rising activity through the day to a peak in the evening, and then a sharp drop-off overnight.
