Joint and Individual Representation of Domains of Physical Activity, Sleep, and Circadian Rhythmicity

Developments in wearable technology have enabled researchers to continuously and objectively monitor various aspects and physiological domains of real life including levels of physical activity, quality of sleep, and strength of circadian rhythm in many epidemiological and clinical studies. Current analytical practice is to summarize each of these three domains individually via a standard inventory of interpretable features, and explore individual associations between the features and clinical variables. However, the features often exhibit significant interaction and correlation both within and between domains. Integration of features across multiple domains remains methodologically challenging. To address this problem, we propose to use joint and individual variation explained, a dimension reduction technique that efficiently deals with multivariate data representing multiple domains. In this paper, we review the most frequently used features to characterize the domains of physical activity, sleep, and circadian rhythmicity and illustrate the approach using wrist-worn actigraphy data from 198 participants of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging.