WebActogram

🌐🏃Actogram from browsers history, may help to retrospectively screen 🌙🛌sleep-wake patterns & disorders!

Description

Python 3 tool to generate a web actogram from web browsers history files.

To screen sleep-wake patterns and disorders, all tools require that the user wear an actigraphic device or record themselves a sleep diary.

The web actogram is the first pseudo-actigraphic tool that can provide an instantaneous estimation of the user’s sleep-wake pattern, aka actogram, by inferring an actogram from the browser’s history. This could allow for mass screening of sleep-wake patterns and disorders.

The limitations are however as follows:

• The sleep patterns are only very indirectly estimated, only the wakefulness patterns can be considered reliable.
• The web actogram reliability depends on whether the user is an avid user of web browsers: they must use their web browsers on a daily basis.
• The user must use solely one browser, otherwise it won’t work (in the future we will merge multiple browsers’ histories).
• The user must primarily use a web browser on a computer (not on a smartphone - this will be implemented in the future).
• The more data over a longer period, the more precisely and robust the pattern will appear.

How the actogram is plotted was inspired by this UCSD tutorial and this scientific paper.

Install & Quickstart

Install with:

pip install webactogram

Use in a terminal (or cmd on Windows):

webactogram

Note: First, you need to cd in a folder with write permission.

This will create a folder actograms in the current folder, and add inside a picture with the latest actogram and a csv file with all the browsers activities recorded.

More options, such as the sampling frequency (and hence granularity of the actogram and its patterns) can be shown with:

webactogram --help

Compatibility

Currently configured to import history from ALL browsers available on the system, from the default user profiles for each:

• Windows:
  • Chrome History file
  • Edge History file
  • Firefox History file
• MacOS:
  • Chrome History file
  • Safari History.db
  • Firefox History file
• Linux:
  • Firefox History file

Currently, this script may not function as intended if you use multiple profiles within one browser (especially for Firefox), or the browser's default installation profile has changed.

Usage

History files are copied from their home directories to a temporary location in the working directory. These copies are then deleted after the script has executed. Only the last_visit_time is read.

Plots are easily generated from the command line:

webactogram

Plots will be saved in a new sub-folder called "actograms" with appropriate timestamp and description.

Script now supports command line arguments for additional customizability. For example:

python actogram.py --freq '15T' --daily_blur 3 --start '2020-01-01'

python actogram.py --freq '30T' --printer_friendly True

python actogram.py --dims (8,8)

Where:

--freq determines the granularity of binned online/offline periods (default is 15 minutes increments, ex.  --freq '15T')

--start_date sets initial date to plot from, default is 180 days ago (ex. --start_date '2022-01-01')

--daily_blur applies median filtering between days (off by default, ex. --daily_blur 3)  

--period_blur applies median filtering between binned time periods (off by default, ex. --period_blur 5)

--normalize normalizes search frequency against max, then applies binary mask (plot shows periods of some search history vs. none, on by default)

--dims sets the relative dimensions of generated actogram plot (ex. --dims (4, 6))

--printer_friendly sets whether activity is shown in black on white (friendly) or vice versa (False by default, ex. --printer_friendly True)

Latest updates

[Feature] Added support for the Default profile of Microsoft Edge for Windows

[Bug fix] Previously there was an artificially low minimum window for all generated plots. Plots can now be shown with minutes resolution

[Feature] Added "activity CDF" subplot to gauge periods of minimum and maximum activity

[Feature] Added cumulative "offline hours" subplot to estimate sleep per 24h period (NB: this yields artificially high results with high freq values)

Authors

This tool is a fork from the excellent online_actogram script by Barrett F. Davis who conceived both the idea and the first implementation initially released in July 2020.

License

MIT Public License.

Similar projects

Another project, inspired by this one, was written in Javascript using D3, but it cannot fetch browser's history: Tylian's D3 Browser's History. How to generate the history.txt file (source): It's a dump of the timestamp column with some manual processing to divide every entry by 1000, since Firefox stores them as a nanosecond epoch for some reason..