Weekly Viz 2021-12-27

How Much Less Active I Have Been Since WFH

This week’s data is pretty special – it’s my own data exported from Apple Watch. I got an Apple Watch back in Aug 2019 as a birthday gift to myself. Since then, I have been wearing it pretty much every moment except when I take showers (also when it charges). This way, it collected tons of data of me, including energy burned, exercise time, heart rate, sleeping hours, etc. These data are extremely valuable for me to understand myself. Therefore, I feel it is a good idea to end this year’s weekly viz with a visualization on my own data.
Ever since WFH due to COVID-19, I have been less active, as I don’t commute and mostly stay at home all day. However, I’ve always curious how much less active I have been. And this is the question I have in mind before creating this week’s visualization. The data point I picked to answer this question is simple – my daily active energy burned measured by kcal, and exercise minutes. Here is a Jupyter Notebook I used to parse the XML file exported from Apple Watch health app. The ActivitySummary tag in the file stores info of daily active energy burned, exercise time, energy target, exercise target, etc.

My Visualization

As the goal here is to create a straightforward visualization to highlight my activity level change since WFH, here I did not overcomplicate it with fancy models, causal inference, etc., but simply plot a scatter chart with daily total active energy burned / exercise minutes, and a line showing the monthly average. But I do have the plan to do more in-depth analysis on this topic, combining other data points like heart rate and workouts :)

Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

Dashboard link

Insights

• Since I started working from home in March 2019, we can see obvious declines in both active energy burned and exercise minutes, mainly because I no longer need to commute to work (used to be 1 hours+ round way);
• However, this decline is not sudden, but rather gradual from March 2019, and reached lowest level around Feb-Mar 2021. Thinking back, at the beginning of WFH, I tried to keep up with the pre-covid activity level by working out more. I used to play this game ‘Ring Fit Adventure’ every night and burn 100-200 calories. However, since it’s an RPG (yes it’s an RPG fitness game lol) with a storyline, eventually, I cleared all stories and missions after 160+ hours’ playing in 2020 Sep, and lost my motivation to keep playing it… Since then, I tried some different workouts like Yoga (which burns much fewer calories), and another game on Switch called Fitness Boxing, but got lazier and lazier :(
• But there is also an slight upward trend since June 2021, and that is when I felt I were too inactive, and decided to workout a bit more and lose some weight;
• There are also some small spikes in some months like Jan 2021, July 2021, Nov 2021, and those are mainly driven by the Apple Watch Fitness app monthly challenge lol – so it introduces a monthly goal every month, like walk xx miles, exercise xx minutes, burn xx calories etc. You can see this sort of game achievement system works pretty well on me…

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