An unexpected benefit provided by wearers of Jawbone’s UP activity tracker is the ability to see geographically which users had their sleep disturbed by the recent Napa earthquake.  The data science team at Jawbone aggregated the sleep patterns for thousands of UP wearers that live in the Bay Area to see how they reacted to the strongest earthquake to hit the area in 25 years.
The magnitude 6.0 earthquake was centered about six miles south-southwest of the town of Napa in the heart of California’s wine country. Â Data from UP users was pulled and categorized by distance from the epicenter. Â Gregory Feinstein from VentureBeat originally requested the data in order to understand how the earthquake affected sleeping patterns in the area.
The analysis found that 93% of wearers in the immediate area (covering the cities of Napa, Sonoma, Vallejo, and Fairfield) woke up (no mention as to the other 7%, either those users are really great sleepers or those UP devices were inactive at the time).  A bit over half of those living 25-50 miles from the epicenter (San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Rosa) were startled awake (55%).  That percentage drops to 25% of residents in the San Jose and Sacramento areas (50-75 miles away) that were woken up the earthquake.  Finally, only 12% of users in the Modesto and Santa Cruz area (75-100 miles away) woke up.
Explore the interactive graph: How the Napa earthquake affected Bay Area sleepers
