Tracking Urban Human Activity from Mobile Phone Calling Patterns

Abstract

Timings of human activities are marked by circadian clocks which in turn are entrained to different environmental signals. In an urban environment the presence of artificial lighting and various social cues tend to disrupt the natural entrainment with the sunlight. However, it is not completely understood to what extent this is the case. Here we exploit the large-scale data analysis techniques to study the mobile phone calling activity of people in large cities to infer the dynamics of urban daily rhythms. From the calling patterns of about 1,000,000 users spread over different cities but lying inside the same time-zone, we show that the onset and termination of the calling activity synchronizes with the east-west progression of the sun. We also find that the onset and termination of the calling activity of users follows a yearly dynamics, varying across seasons, and that its timings are entrained to solar midnight. Furthermore, we show that the average mid-sleep time of people living in urban areas depends on the age and gender of each cohort as a result of biological and social factors.

This manuscript includes and extends content from our old manuscript "Seasonal and geographical influence on sleeping patterns inferred from mobile phone data", which was split into two parts due to its length and new investigations added

References in corpus (2)

• Calling patterns in human communication dynamics
• SensibleSleep: A Bayesian Model for Learning Sleep Patterns from Smartphone Events

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Latitudinal trends in human primary activities: characterizing the winter day as a synchronizer
• Link-centric analysis of variation by demographics in mobile phone communication patterns
• Awakening City: Traces of the Circadian Rhythm within the Mobile Phone Network Data
• Impact of environmental changes on the dynamics of temporal networks
• The Rhythms of Transient Relationships: Allocating time between weekdays and weekends