Your Day, on a Heatmap: What Wearables Reveal About How Working Adults Move

SC L
2 days ago
3 min read

If you’ve ever felt that your day is mostly spent sitting—at your desk, in meetings, on the commute—you’re not imagining it. When we looked at four weeks of data from your Oura rings, a very clear pattern emerged. And it shows up most strikingly in this heatmap below:

What does this figure depict?

You are looking at a visualization of when people are physically active across the day, using heatmaps.

Each row is a day
Each column is a 5-minute window across 24 hours
“Hotter” colours = higher likelihood of physical activity

Think of it as a daily movement fingerprint.

When this fingerprint was compared across 3 local Singaporean samples – college freshmen (18-25y), working-age adults (23-67y), and older adults (67-80y), the working-age pattern appeared as distinct movement bouts squeezed into narrow time windows.

Activity spikes in the morning and evening, lining up almost perfectly with commute times
A small bump around lunchtime
Long stretches of low activity through the core workday

In other words, physical activity for working adults on the weekdays is highly structured and time-boxed. We move when our schedules force us to—getting to work, getting home—but much less in between.

This pattern contrasts sharply with older adults, whose heatmaps show steady movement spread across the entire day, and with college students, whose activity levels were markedly lower and clustered around class transitions.

Weekdays vs weekends: same amount, different timing

One surprising finding is that working adults don’t necessarily move less on weekends. Instead:

Activity starts later
It’s more evenly spread out
The sharp “commute peaks” disappear

This suggests that working adults also move when time pressure eases—but weekday structures strongly constrain when movement can happen.

Despite this, working adults still moved significantly less than the older adults across the 24h day, on both weekdays (344 vs. 425 min) and weekends (352 vs. 409 min)!

Why this matters for health

Our analyses go beyond movement counts. We also looked at how reallocating time across the 24-hour day relates to markers of cardiometabolic health.

The takeaway for working adults is powerful:

Replacing even 30 minutes of sedentary time with physical activity was associated with
- Lower obesity levels
- Better vascular health
Importantly, this didn’t require intense workouts—total movement time mattered

The hidden opportunity in the working day

For working adults, the biggest gains may not come from adding more exercise, but from redistributing movement across the day.

That could mean:

Short walking breaks between meetings
Standing or walking calls
Light movement during traditionally “dead zones” of the day
Designing workspaces and schedules that make movement the default, not an extra task

Rethinking the future

Physical inactivity is often framed as a problem of ageing. The heatmaps tell a different story. In fact, older adults were the most physically active on both weekdays and weekends, while college freshmen were the least active. This inversion should prompt us to rethink not ageing bodies, but modern lifestyles.

Have everyday conveniences—online shopping, food delivery, ride-hailing—quietly stripped away the incidental movement that once filled our days? Digital platforms have transformed how we work, learn, socialise, and relax—often anchoring us to chairs and screens. In the process, movement has been engineered out of daily life.

These changes likely affect younger adults most. Older adults built their routines in an era where walking, household labour, and in-person activities were embedded into everyday living. Younger generations, by contrast, have come of age in systems optimised for minimal movement.

That’s why the solution isn’t willpower. It’s design—of jobs, schedules, cities, and daily routines. Your heatmap doesn’t need to look like a marathon. It just needs fewer long, cold stretches.