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Wearable tech proves you can’t sleep through an earthquake

Click to play video: 'Earthquake rattles home outside of San Francisco'
Earthquake rattles home outside of San Francisco
Earthquake rattles home outside of San Francisco – Aug 24, 2014

WATCH: Earthquake shaking a home in the San Francisco suburb of Hercules early Sunday morning.

TORONTO – The worst earthquake to hit Northern California in nearly 25 years caused widespread power outages, property destruction and, evidently, many hours of lost sleep.

San Francisco-based wearable technology company Jawbone analyzed data to show how the quake affected the sleep of users across the Bay Area.

The data shows that 93 per cent of Jawbone UP users in cities less than 24 kilometres from the epicentre woke up suddenly at 3:20 a.m. when the quake struck.

A visualization shows how the South Napa Earthquake’s effect on the UP wearers’ sleep changes with the distance from the epicentre. Created by Jawbone Senior Data Scientist Brian Wilt. (Image courtesy of Jawbone). Image courtesy of Jawbone

The UP activity tracker allows users to analyze their sleep patterns by seeing how long they entered a deep sleep and how many times they woke up during the night.

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The magnitude-6.0 quake struck at 3:20 a.m. Sunday about 10 kilometres south of Napa and lasted 10 to 20 seconds depending on proximity to the epicentre, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

READ MORE: Strong California quake shakes famed wine country

It was the largest to shake the San Francisco Bay Area since the magnitude-6.9 Loma Prieta quake struck in 1989, collapsing part of the Bay Bridge roadway and killing more than 60 people, most when an Oakland freeway fell.

It was felt widely throughout the region, with people reporting feeling it more than 320 kilometres south of Napa and as far east as the Nevada border.

But perhaps the coolest part about Jawbone’s study is that it shows how long it took people to get back to sleep.

“It took the residents a long time to go back to sleep, especially in the areas that felt the shaking the strongest,” read a blog post written by Eugene Mandel, data scientist at Jawbone.

“In fact, 45% of UP wearers less than 15 miles [24 kilometres] from the epicenter stayed up the rest of the night.”
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