Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jan 29, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 1, 2019 - Mar 29, 2019
Date Accepted: Jan 28, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Measuring circadian rhythms of telephone call activity in older adults with a persistence and synchronization analysis : Descriptive study
ABSTRACT
Background:
In the elderly population, the analysis of the circadian rhythms of social activity may help in supervising the homebound disabled and chronically ill populations. The circadian rhythms are monitored over time to determine whether they are synchronized with how older adults act and react socially during the day. Recently, the analysis of telephone call detail records has led to the possibility of determining circadian rhythms of social activity in an objective, unobtrusive way for young patients. However, the persistence and synchronization of circadian rhythms in telephone use have yet to be investigated in other populations, including older ones.
Objective:
This paper reports our investigation of the persistence and synchronization of circadian rhythms in telephone communication by older adults.
Methods:
The study uses a longitudinal, 12-month dataset combining call detail records and questionnaire data from 26 volunteers aged 70 years or more to determine the existence of persistent and synchronized circadian rhythms in their telephone communications. The study worked with four specific telecommunication parameters: (1) recipient of telephone call (alter), (2) time at which call begins, (3) duration of call, and (4) direction of call. We focus on two issues: (1) the existence of persistent circadian rhythms of outgoing and incoming telephone calls in the older population, and (2) synchronization with the circadian rhythm in the way the older population telephones and responds to telephone calls.
Results:
The results show that older adults have their own specific circadian rhythms for placing telephone calls and receiving telephone calls. These rhythms are partly structured by the way in which older adults allocate their communication time over the day. In addition, despite minor differences between circadian rhythms for outgoing and incoming calls, the two rhythms are significantly synchronized.
Conclusions:
These results demonstrate the existence of persistent and synchronized circadian rhythms in the telephone activity of older adults. For healthcare, these results provide an opportunity to use telephones to track the social activity of older adults and thereby monitor their health status in an objective, unobtrusive way via the circadian rhythm of their social activity.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.