14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is no longer producing the Band activity tracker, but despite this, the device continues to be one of the most advanced currently on the market. And living proof is the simple fact that so many researchers are using it in their projects for a wide variety of goals.
The latest such project involved a total of 30,000 Band owners who agreed to provide researches with access to their Health Dashboard in order to analyze data that would help them determine the effects of sleep deprivation.
The study determined what pretty much everyone knew: the less you sleep, the more productivity is affected, and it takes up to several days for the recovery process to complete.
Researchers indicate that if you sleep less than six hours for two consecutive nights, there’s a big chance that you’ll be sluggish for the next six days, and this recovery period can extend substantially should other factors be involved.
Tired Band owners needed more time to search the web
Furthermore, to determine how productivity is impacted by lack of sleep, researchers analyzed Band owners and a total of 75 million keystrokes and clicks on Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
“Even small differences in the amount of time it would take you to click on the result are indicative of how rapidly you are processing that information. The idea is people have slower processing speeds as they get more tired,” Jamie Zeitzer, a study co-author and assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, said.
Full results of the research will be unveiled at the World Wide Web Conference in April, but Microsoft wanted to provide us with a little preview just to show how powerful its Band activity tracker can be.
Unfortunately, despite this super-advanced features, the Band seems to be going dark, with the company itself giving up on manufacturing and ditching plans for a third generation. On the other hand, Microsoft will continue investing in the Microsoft Band app, which also provides one of the richest sets of data currently on mobile devices.