A Large-Scale Observational Study of the Causal Effects of a Behavioral Health Nudge

This paper was accepted at the workshop “Causality for Real-world Impact” at NeurIPS 2022.
The Apple Watch encourages users to stand throughout the day by delivering a notification onto the users’ wrist if they have been sitting for the first 50 minutes of an hour. This simple behavioral intervention exemplifies the classical definition of nudge as a choice architecture that alters behavior without forbidding options or significantly changing economic incentives. In order to estimate from observational data the causal effect of the notification on the user’s standing probability through-out…Apple Machine Learning Research