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The Government of India imposed the strictest lockdown from 25 March 2020 till 31 May 2020 to control the spread of coronavirus outbreak. Consequently, about 1.38 billion people were under home confinement. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we studied circadian rhythm (CR) in the usages of Facebook Messenger (FBM), as a group phenomenon, and published the findings in this journal. We thought it would be worthwhile to carry out a sequel study to assess if there are any changes in the CR in the patterns of digital activity of the FBM users during the COVID-19-triggered lockdown. All the authors of this paper harvested real-time data from their FBM account for over 16 consecutive days between 26 March and 17 April 2020. A statistically significant CR in the digital activity pattern of FBM friends of all the authors was validated. Results of one-way repeated measures ANOVA revealed a statistically significant higher Mesor and amplitude of the rhythm in FBM activity patterns during the lockdown; however, acrophase remained unchanged. We concluded that the COVID-19-triggered lockdown did not affect the location of the peaks and the persistence of CR in the online activity patterns of FBM users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Facebook Messenger (FBM) is one of the most popular instant messaging social apps, launched by Facebook in 2010. As of October 2019, there were about 1.3 billion FBM users worldwide. In this study, we analyzed periodicities in the online activity patterns of users in FBM. We did not recruit any subjects in this study; rather four of us used our own FBM accounts to reveal the presence of any rhythms with τ = 12 h or τ = 24 h or τ = 168 h in the patterns FBM usage among our FB friends. We log-transformed the time series data and subjected those to Cosinor rhythmometry. The peaks in the daily pattern of FBM usages, revealed from Cosinor analyses, and harmonics curve fittings validated the presence of multi-frequency rhythms in the longitudinal time-series data captured over a period of 16 days. The underlying basis of the observed multi-frequency rhythms could be attributed to the phenomenon of social synchronization. The current findings might bear commercial applications with special reference to targeted content advertising (TCA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present investigation was undertaken to examine the effects of shift work on pulmonary function. 217 subjects from a local steel plant, volunteered for this study. Of these, 65 were day workers (DWs) and 152 were shift workers (SWs). Pulmonary function, such as vital capacity (VC), forced vital capacity (FVC), forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV[sub 1]), peak expiratory flow rate (PEFR) and percent deviation of PEFR from the expected PEFR in each subject was measured between 09:00 to 11:00. Both day workers (DWs) and shift workers (SWs) were divided into two groups, based on age, i.e., ≤ 40 y and ≤ 41 y. The results indicate that the average levels of VC, FVC, FEV[sub 1] and PEFR were significantly lower in older age in both DWs and SWs when compared to their younger counterparts. Although elderly shift workers had higher levels of VC, FVC and FEV[sub 1] than day workers of comparable age, the difference was not statistically significant for FVC and FEV[sub 1]. In contrast, average value of PEFR was lower in older shift workers. Further, mean percent deviation of observed PEFR from the expected value was conspicuously low in elderly shift workers. In summary, shift work appears to accelerate age-related decline in PEFR at least in elderly shift workers. Results of multiple regression analysis and correlation analysis compliment this finding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]