A young boy asleep with his dog (Photo : Sherman/Three Lions/Getty Images)
Smartphones have helped scientists in figuring out how the rest of the world sleeps through an app that also helps the user to reduce the effects of jetlag.
Sleep is important and that is no secret. However, most people neglect their sleeping habits and end up becoming unhealthy with diseases and such.
Researchers from the University of Michigan, mostly mathematicians, have used the data gathered from the ENTRAIN app. Danny Forger, an expert in circadian clocks, have led the study, which was published in the Science Advances journal.
Data was gathered from over 5,000 users of the said app, which helps people overcome the effects of jetlag by telling users when to avoid and expose themselves to light. The app was originally launched in 2014.
About eight percent of the international users from the app have agreed to send their data anonymously to the university's servers. This provided the team with an abundant source of data.
Forger said that conducting lab experiments can be expensive and that there would be no other factors affecting the participants' quality of sleep. For instance, the real-life problems of worrying about dogs and children are not present in the lab.
After analyzing all of the data from the smartphone app, Forger and the researchers were able to find out the average hours of sleep. Men scheduled an average of 7.7 hours while women had 8.07 hours on average, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Another factor that the researchers discovered was age and nationality. Older people were found to sleep earlier than younger people.
Users in Japan and Singapore also had the shortest sleep duration. Meanwhile, users in the Netherlands had the longest hours of sleep on average at 8 hours and 12 minutes.
"Across the board, it appears that society governs bedtime and one's internal clock governs wake time, and a later bedtime is linked to a loss of sleep. At the same time, we found a strong wake-time effect from users' biological clocks-not just their alarm clocks," Forger said in a press release.
Further research may be needed to dive into deeper results and analyzation. The data from the ENTRAIN smartphone data app can be affected by many factors that could also be the cause for shorter or longer sleeps of the users. The researchers are now planning to launch a new version of the app.
