Our Changing World: Planning for good days

Work, ferry the kids, do the shopping, tidy the house, laundry, meal prep - our lives are busy, and filled with responsibilities, so how do we make sure to leave some time to do the things we want?

Time use epidemiology might help.

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"You cannot have a good day, every day of your life," says Professor Scott Duncan. We all know this to be true. But what Scott would like to enable us to do is to plan for good days rather than just hoping we stumble across one.

"If you can add up more good days than days that have just sort of taken the control out of your hands, then you'll end up building that wellbeing so that your feelings of life satisfaction... will start to grow because you're accumulating these good days" he says.

Scott is a professor of population health at Auckland University of Technology, investigating wellbeing and ways to improve it at both a community and individual level.

A key part of this is increasing physical activity, says Scott. "It's such a perfect medicine."

Exercise can lead to benefits in the realms of mental health, physical health, physical function and social connection. But there are also only so many waking hours in the day. That's where time use epidemiology comes in. Instead of simply saying 'you need to do more physical activity' the idea is to look at how a person uses their time, every minute of every day, and ask what could be changed or adjusted to leave more time for the good stuff.

Which is not just exercise. There are many ways to look at holistic wellbeing, but Scott uses the Mental Health Foundation's five ways to wellbeing - Be Active, Connect, Give, Keep Learning and Take Notice.

The important thing about this approach is that it is individualised, says Scott. "Some of the issues that you have with population guidelines that come out, around physical activity or nutrition or whatever it might be, they tend to be one size fits all and they don't always fit everyone. So, the good thing about time use is when you're talking to people about their day, you're asking them about what they want to do, what they want to achieve… And so the day that you might create would depend on what they want to see at the end of it."

Our days can look quite different depending on our life stages, and what we do. For example, someone working in pest control out in the bush works a physically demanding, socially isolated job. Compare that to someone working in a busy office, with multiple sit-down team meetings in a day.

To get into the nitty gritty of how people spend their time, Scott and research fellow Dr Anantha Narayanan are asking a group of study participants to wear a sensor that tracks their movement. Using a mesh sticky plaster, the small, light sensor is attached to the participant's thigh, where it takes acceleration readings every five seconds across an entire week.

An algorithm then converts this raw data into activities - sitting, sleeping or low, medium, or high intensity exercise, resulting in a detailed outline of a person's day. "We could basically look at the number of transitions from a sit to stand, like how many times you stood up during the day," says Anantha.

This detailed activity tracking is coupled with momentary wellbeing surveys. Three times a day each participant is asked to fill in a short survey on an app on their phone. The person is asked what they are doing in that moment and who they are doing it with, and then they are asked to rank, on a sliding scale, how happy, respected, energized, stressed and lonely they are feeling. "So you can look at how people are feeling during the day and the value comes in when you overlap this data, with the time use data that we collect," says Anantha.

This pilot study, with 50 participants, is the first step in investigating whether this individualised time use approach will work. The data they gather will be used to develop and train an AI model that will then suggest time use prompts to each person, depending on what their goals are. After that, they'll scale up to 500 participants.

It is early in the research, but Scott sees a potential to help many people have better days.

"It may not work, but if it does work, I think an approach like this could be really useful to be picked up at a national scale by whatever government agency feels that it's useful to them... if you can show that actually these sort of systems give people what they need, not only what they need to hear, but when they need to hear it to improve their lives, then I think it can only be a good investment."

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