This paper was accepted on the workshop “Causality for Actual-world Impression” at NeurIPS 2022.
The Apple Watch encourages customers to face all through the day by delivering a notification onto the customers’ wrist if they’ve been sitting for the primary 50 minutes of an hour. This straightforward behavioral intervention exemplifies the classical definition of nudge as a alternative structure that alters conduct with out forbidding choices or considerably altering financial incentives. As a way to estimate from observational information the causal impact of the notification on the person’s standing likelihood through-out the day, we introduce a novel regression discontinuity design for time collection information with time-varying therapy. Utilizing over 76 billions minutes of personal and nameless observational standing information from greater than 160,000 topics enrolled within the public Apple Coronary heart and Motion Examine from 2019 to 2022, we present that the nudge will increase the likelihood of standing by as much as 49.5% throughout all of the studied inhabitants. The nudge is equally efficient for contributors self-identified as male or feminine, and it’s simpler in older folks, rising the standing likelihood in folks over 75 years previous by greater than 60%. We additionally reveal that closing Apple Watch Exercise Rings, one other easy alternative structure that visualizes the participant’s every day progress in Transfer, Train, and Stand, correlates with person’s response to the intervention; for customers who shut their exercise rings recurrently, the standing nudge nearly triples their likelihood of standing. This observational examine, which is without doubt one of the largest of its form exploring the causal results of nudges within the common inhabitants, demonstrates the effectiveness of easy behavioral well being interventions and introduces a novel utility of regression discontinuity design prolonged right here to time-varying therapies.
