Associations of seasonally available global positioning systems-derived walkability and objectively measured sleep in the Nurses' Health Study 3 Mobile Health Substudy.

Background: Sleep is influenced by the environments that we experience while awake and while asleep. Neighborhood walkability has been linked with chronic disease and lifestyle factors, such as physical activity; however, evidence for the association between walkability and sleep is mixed. Extant studies assign walkability based on residential addresses, which does not account for mobility. We examined the association between walkability and sleep in the Nurses' Health Study 3 (NHS3) Mobile Health Substudy (MHS).

Methods: From 2018 to 2020, individuals in the United States-based NHS3 prospective cohort participated in the MHS, in which minute-level global positioning systems (GPS) data and objective sleep duration and efficiency measures were collected via a custom smartphone application and Fitbit, respectively, for four 7-day periods across a year to capture seasonal variability. Census tract walkability was calculated by summing z-scores of population density (2015-2019 American Community Survey), business density (2018 Infogroup), and intersection density (2018 TIGER/Line road shapefiles). We ran generalized additive mixed models with penalized splines to estimate the association between walkability and sleep, adjusting for individual-level covariates as well as GPS-based exposure to environmental and contextual factors.

Results: The average main sleep period duration was 7.9 hours and the mean sleep efficiency was 93%. For both sleep duration and sleep efficiency, we did not observe an association with daily average walkability exposure.

Conclusion: In this study of women across the United States, we found that daily GPS-based neighborhood walkability exposure during wake time was not associated with objective wearable-derived sleep duration or sleep efficiency.