In this poster, I’m trying to find a correlation between my daily caffeine intake, stress levels, and sleep duration and quality, all tracked over the course of 14 days in January 2024.
Data Collection & Analysis
Among the two types of data I tracked, which was sleep and mood, I chose a few specific variables within to find correlations between. These variables were:
- Daily Caffeine Intake (in cups per day)
- Stress Level (scale of 1–10)
- Sleep Duration (in hours and minutes)
- Sleep Quality** (score of 1–100)
I wore a Fitbit Inspire 3 to track my sleep duration and quality specifically, but the rest was tracked by manually logging values into the data sheet. All the information shown below was logged at the end of each day between the days of January 13 and 26. For this project, I chose to only include a 14 day range, leaving out the 13th.
**Sleep Quality or Sleep Score is tracked on the Fitbit app to help better understand our sleep each night so you can see trends in your sleep patterns. It's based on heart rate, time spent awake or restless, and sleep stages.
Initially, I noticed no patterns when comparing all of my raw data because all my data was unorganized. but when i rearranged it to suit how it could be easily visualized, I started to make some minor correlations. I noticed that on the days when my stress level was the highest, I slept less. But what I found interesting is that my caffeine intake level was very random, where there were only 4 days that I consumed coffee more than once.
Since my data range for each category ended up being slightly less extreme than the scales I set for it, I changed it to reflect this:
- Daily Caffeine Intake = 1–2 cups
- Stress Level = 3–6 range
- Sleep Duration = 5–10 hours
- Sleep Quality = 69–82 range
Design Process
At first I wanted to see an overall perspective/correlation, but i struggled with my initial concept for it because it was too vague and abstract, where you couldn't actually make visual correlations. I had an idea of using a conceptual slice to show each day and put all my data on each slice. But this became complicated because I could only fit certain types of information on there, and other people struggled to read it.
This made me realize I need to find a more promising visual concept to portray my data in a sensible manner. I decided to focus on caffeine, since I see making coffee as a daily ritual. I wanted to try and connect caffeine intake with stress and sleep to see if there are any possible conclusions I could see.
I made a few sketches with daily mugs and coffee cups, and ultimately decided to try incorporating something more than just a bar graph representation within each cup. I came up with the idea of using some sort of visual indicator using color, shape and repetition to create a possible concept.
I decided to use latte art to represent duration of sleep, coffee color for stress levels, pie chart for the sleep quality score and an extra cup on days where I had more than one cup of coffee. With the help of my professor and in-class critique sessions, I simplified my design and made important aesthetic choices that work towards my visual concept without compromising the data held within.