Circadian Rhythms in the Telephone Calls of Older Adults: Observational Descriptive Study

Abstract

Background Recent studies have thoughtfully and convincingly demonstrated the possibility of estimating the circadian rhythms of young adults’ social activity by analyzing their telephone call-detail records (CDRs). In the field of health monitoring, this development may offer new opportunities for supervising a patient’s health status by collecting objective, unobtrusive data about their daily social interactions. However, before considering this future perspective, whether and how similar results could be observed in other populations, including older ones, should be established. Objective This study was designed specifically to address the circadian rhythms in the telephone calls of older adults. Methods A longitudinal, 12-month dataset combining CDRs and questionnaire data from 26 volunteers aged 65 years or older was used to examine individual differences in the daily rhythms of telephone call activity. The study used outgoing CDRs only and worked with three specific telecommunication parameters: (1) call recipient (alter), (2) time of day, and (3) call duration. As did the studies involving young adults, we analyzed three issues: (1) the existence of circadian rhythms in the telephone call activity of older adults, (2) their persistence over time, and (3) the alter-specificity of calls by calculating relative entropy. Results We discovered that older adults had their own specific circadian rhythms of outgoing telephone call activity whose salient features and preferences varied across individuals, from morning until night. We demonstrated that rhythms were consistent, as reflected by their persistence over time. Finally, results suggested that the circadian rhythms of outgoing telephone call activity were partly structured by how older adults allocated their communication time across their social network. Conclusions Overall, these results are the first to have demonstrated the existence, persistence, and alter-specificity of the circadian rhythms of the outgoing telephone call activity of older adults. These findings suggest an opportunity to consider modern telephone technologies as potential sensors of daily activity. From a health care perspective, these sensors could be harnessed for unobtrusive monitoring purposes.

Gaining Insights Into the Estimation of the Circadian Rhythms of Social Activity in Older Adults From Their Telephone Call Activity With Statistical Learning: Observational Study

“…More importantly, these circadian patterns were found to persist over time. More recently, such a descriptive analysis was successfully reproduced, and got the same results, with an older population [ 39 ]. To the best of our knowledge, these preliminary results were the first ones that specifically concerned the circadian rhythms of telephone call activity of older adults.…”

“…Data collection, volunteer recruitment, and data preprocessing followed the general principles set in previous investigations of this secondary analysis [ 39 - 43 ] and remain unchanged for consistency.…”

“…Thus, this paper is a secondary analysis of recent analyses [ 39 , 40 ] and is specifically designed to address whether and how the circadian rhythms of social activity observed in the telephone calls of older adults could be modeled. To this end, we analyzed a 12-month data set of outgoing telephone CDRs of 26 adults older than 65 years of age.…”

Novel statistical approach for assessing the persistence of the circadian rhythms of social activity from telephone call detail records in older adults

“…Finally, for the circadian rhythms, Aledavood et al reported on the same dataset as that used in 21 the existence of temporal signatures in the way participants distribute their frequency of outgoing calls according to the hour of day 25 . Other studies further show how these persistent circadian patterns can be also evidenced with other types of social interactions 26,27 , such as text messages 26 , or with other populations as the older one 24,28 .…”

“…On the whole, this literature emphasizes the relevance of call detail records (CDRs)which synthetize telephone calls and SMS exchanges of a telephone user-for the analysis of the circadian rhythms of social interactions that occur at telephone 15 . In particular, it is evinced that CDRs analysis permit to investigate continuously, objectively and unobtrusively, essential properties of such social rhythms [24][25][26][27][28] . Following this train of thought, recent works have reported how the persistence in time of social interactions occurring during the day at telephone could possibly be one of these properties [24][25][26][27] .…”