If you’ve ever felt that your day is mostly spent sitting — at your desk, in meetings, on the commute — you’re not imagining it. When we looked at four weeks of data from your Oura rings, a very clear pattern emerged. And it shows up most strikingly in this heatmap below:
What Does this Figure Depict?
You are looking at a visualization of when people are physically active across the day, using heatmaps.
- Each row is a day
- Each column is a 5-minute window across 24 hours
- “Hotter” colours = higher likelihood of physical activity
Think of it as a daily movement fingerprint.
When this fingerprint was compared across 3 local Singaporean samples – college freshmen (18-25y), working-age adults (23-67y), and older adults (67-80y), the working-age pattern appeared as distinct movement bouts squeezed into narrow time windows.
- Activity spikes in the morning and evening, lining up almost perfectly with commute times
- A small bump around lunchtime
- Long stretches of low activity through the core workday
In other words, physical activity for working adults on the weekdays is highly structured and time-boxed. We move when our schedules force us to — getting to work, getting home — but much less in between.
This pattern contrasts sharply with older adults, whose heatmaps show steady movement spread across the entire day, and with college students, whose activity levels were markedly lower and clustered around class transitions.
