The earthquake that struck Northern California early Sunday morning sent many local residents stumbling from their beds and scrambling for steady ground. How many? You can get good sense of all this nocturnal movement from an unexpected source: wearable fitness trackers that measure the sleeping patterns of the people who wear them.

The Jawbone UP can gauge nighttime tossing and turning in an effort to tell how well people sleep. On Sunday, Jawbone data scientists aggregated data from UP users based on location to visualize thousands of people waking up at once when the Napa quake hit. The spike, pictured in the chart above, doesn’t look that different from the jump on a seismograph when the shockwave from a temblor goes coursing through the ground.

Some have joked that a chart demonstrating that an earthquake wakes lots of people up isn’t exactly providing a major new insight. But Jawbone’s graph does offer an interesting means of thinking about an earthquake’s impact.

Read the Full Article: Source – Wired
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/fitness-trackers-show-how-many-people-woke-up-during-the-bay-area-quake/

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