Dad Tracks Newborn's Sleeping Habits And Turns Them Into Something Awesome

With patience (and lack of sleep) on his side, one dad has turned his daughter’s sleeping patterns into an interesting data visualization.

Andrew Elliott from Canberra, Australia, recorded his daughter’s sleeping times for the first 18 months of her life (she’s now 19 months old) using an app called Baby Connect. After exporting the data, Elliott used the information from his daughter’s first four months to create an interesting image. With data visualization tools (Rhino with the Grasshopper plug-in for all you tech gurus), the dad turned the information he had recorded into the shape he preferred, a circle. He then used Adobe Illustrator to make the graphic look like this:

Elliott posted his data visualization on Reddit on Dec. 30, where it quickly made it to the front page. In his post, he explained that the circle represents 24 hours, which means each revolution represents one day. The dark color reflects when she was asleep, and the light color reflects when she was awake. The data begins with the innermost spiral, and midnight is at the top.

Elliott told The Huffington Post that he has been “absolutely stunned” by the response and that he might do another data visualization with the other data he’s recorded as his daughter has grown. But what he’s most excited to do is turn the visualization into something his daughter will have forever.

“I chose this style because my aim is to build a clock for her room that has this artwork as the face of the clock,” he told HuffPost. “The clock will have a 24-hour mechanism in it so the hour hands will line up with the actual sleep times of her patterns when she was younger.”