Description

Create a data portrait out of a personal habit of yours. For the past week, I tracked my sleep cycle with an app that measures the amount of hours slept and the fluctuations between sleep cycles. With online courses and time differences, I realized that my sleep routine has changed and wanted to this investigate further. There are four stages of sleep, one rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and three non-REM (NREM) sleep, and we go through these stages throughout our sleep. The first NREM stage, also known as the "dozing off" stage, is when your brain activites begin to slow down. The body isn't fully relaxed but it is easy to either move onto the second NREM stage or wake up. In the second stage, the body experiences more relaxed breathing, heart rates and brain activity. Most people spend half their sleep in this stage. The third NREM stage is known as deep sleep and this is when muscles and breathing further relax. This stage is crucial for bodily growth and recovery. The higher the stage of NREM sleep, the more difficult it is to wake someone from their sleep. On the other hand, REM sleep is when brain activity picks up, almost similar to when you are awake. I collected my sleep data and created a data portrait out of this. It reads left to right from midnight to 7 AM, and top to bottom from Monday to Sunday.

Design Process

My sleep tracker gives a graph with fluctuations which I calculated into numbers by referring to a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being fully awake and 100 being in deep sleep. I created a scale with increments of 10 so that I could closely estimate the value of my sleep in every hour. In this way, I was able to portray the hours of sleep I had as well as the quality of sleep I had each day. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and this is demonstrated by the blank space or 0. Moreover, the scale of the ellipses are determined by the data so the deeper the sleep or higher the value, the ellipse is bigger, and vice versa for smaller ellipses. Because I wanted to make my data portrait like stars in the sky, I integrated setInterval to change the color of the hours when I wasn't in deep sleep. As if my mind is blinking awake, I selectively chose the hours when I wasn't fully asleep and made them like shining stars. The hours when I was in deep sleep, I used setTimeout to show its stability of the state of sleep.

Reflection

I think it is charming how data portraits can visually suggest what kind of information they represent but also have a lot of room for interpretation. I wanted to somewhat abstract mine by depicting the night sky but at the same time keep a connection to the concept of night and sleep. Moving forward, I hope to collect more data so that it would look more like a sky packed with stars.

Credits

Information on sleep cycles are from Sleep Foundation.