arXiv subjects

Laura S. P. Bloomfield

Publications and source records attributed to Laura S. P. Bloomfield.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Identifying Body Composition Measures That Correlate with Self-Compassion and Social Support

This study explores the relationship between body composition metrics, self-compassion, and social support among college students. Using seasonal body composition data from the InBody770 system and psychometric measures from the Lived Experiences Measured Using Rings Study (LEMURS) (n=156; freshmen=66, sophomores=90), Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) reveals body composition metrics exhibit moderate correlation with self-compassion and social support. Certain physiological and psychological features showed strong and consistent relationships with well-being across the academic year. Trunk and leg impedance stood out as key physiological indicators, while mindfulness, over-identification, affectionate support, and tangible support emerged as recurring psychological and social correlates. This demonstrates that body composition metrics can serve as valuable biomarkers for indicating self-perceived psychosocial well-being, offering insights for future research on scalable mental health modeling and intervention strategies.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Aim High, Stay Private: Differentially Private Synthetic Data Enables Public Release of Behavioral Health Information with High Utility

Sharing health and behavioral data raises significant privacy concerns, as conventional de-identification methods are susceptible to privacy attacks. Differential Privacy (DP) provides formal guarantees against re-identification risks, but practical implementation necessitates balancing privacy protection and the utility of data. We demonstrate the use of DP to protect individuals in a real behavioral health study, while making the data publicly available and retaining high utility for downstream users of the data. We use the Adaptive Iterative Mechanism (AIM) to generate DP synthetic data for Phase 1 of the Lived Experiences Measured Using Rings Study (LEMURS). The LEMURS dataset comprises physiological measurements from wearable devices (Oura rings) and self-reported survey data from first-year college students. We evaluate the synthetic datasets across a range of privacy budgets, epsilon = 1 to 100, focusing on the trade-off between privacy and utility. We evaluate the utility of the synthetic data using a framework informed by actual uses of the LEMURS dataset. Our evaluation identifies the trade-off between privacy and utility across synthetic datasets generated with different privacy budgets. We find that synthetic data sets with epsilon = 5 preserve adequate predictive utility while significantly mitigating privacy risks. Our methodology establishes a reproducible framework for evaluating the practical impacts of epsilon on generating private synthetic datasets with numerous attributes and records, contributing to informed decision-making in data sharing practices.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Collective sleep and activity patterns of college students from wearable devices

To optimize interventions for improving wellness, it is essential to understand habits, which wearable devices can measure with greater precision. Using high temporal resolution biometric data taken from the Oura Gen3 ring, we examine daily and weekly sleep and activity patterns of a cohort of young adults (N=582) in their first semester of college. A high compliance rate is observed for both daily and nightly wear, with slight dips in wear compliance observed shortly after waking up and also in the evening. Most students have a late-night chronotype with a median midpoint of sleep at 5AM, with males and those with mental health impairment having more delayed sleep periods. Social jetlag, or the difference in sleep times between free days and school days, is prevalent in our sample. While sleep periods generally shift earlier on weekdays and later on weekends, sleep duration on both weekdays and weekends is shorter than during prolonged school breaks, suggesting chronic sleep debt when school is in session. Synchronized spikes in activity consistent with class schedules are also observed, suggesting that walking in between classes is a widespread behavior in our sample that substantially contributes to physical activity. Lower active calorie expenditure is associated with weekends and a delayed but longer sleep period the night before, suggesting that for our cohort, active calorie expenditure is affected less by deviations from natural circadian rhythms and more by the timing associated with activities. Our study shows that regular sleep and activity routines may be inferred from consumer wearable devices if high temporal resolution and long data collection periods are available.

cs.CY↗