Earthquake: from individual behavior to mass understanding

The population of the San Francisco Bay Area was awakened suddenly by an earthquake last month and even at that hour the social networks lit up with hashtags and updates declaring status’ of fear, concern, and safety. The USGS was the logical source for instantaneous data on quake, however there are more than just seismographs recording the data points in 2014.

Michael Andrew, AKQA’s Executive Data Science Director, has provided us with an overview of how our personal data can be used to tell a larger story about events and their impacts. In this case Jawbone’s data science team, in a widely shared chart, posted the next day showed that not only did the Bay Area wake up to the earthquake but that you were much more likely to wake up the closer you were to the epicenter.

Jawbone - visualization prepared by our Senior Data Scientist Brian Wilt that shows how the South Napa Earthquake’s effect on the UP wearers’ sleep changes with the distance from the epicenter.