4,849 research outputs found
Understanding, Discovering, and Mitigating Habitual Smartphone Use in Young Adults
People, especially young adults, often use their smartphones out of habit: They compulsively browse social networks, check emails, and play video-games with little or no awareness at all. While previous studies analyzed this phenomena qualitatively, e.g., by showing that users perceive it as meaningless and addictive, yet our understanding of how to discover smartphone habits and mitigate their disruptive effects is limited. Being able to automatically assess habitual smartphone use, in particular, might have different applications, e.g., to design better âdigital wellbeingâ solutions for mitigating meaningless habitual use.
To close this gap, we first define a data analytic methodology based on clustering and association rules mining to automatically discover complex smartphone habits from mobile usage data. We assess the methodology over more than 130,000 phone usage sessions collected from users aged between 16 and 33, and we show evidence that smartphone habits of young adults can be characterized by various types of links between contextual situations and usage sessions, which are highly diversified and differently perceived across users. We then apply the proposed methodology in Socialize, a digital wellbeing app that (i) monitors habitual smartphone behaviors in real time and (ii) uses proactive notifications and just-in-time reminders to encourage users to avoid any identified smartphone habits they consider as meaningless. An in-the-wild study with 20 users (ages 19â31) demonstrates that Socialize can assist young adults in better controlling their smartphone usage with a significant reduction of their unwanted smartphone habits
A Smartphone-Based System for Outdoor Data Gathering Using a Wireless Beacon Network and GPS Data: From Cyber Spaces to Senseable Spaces
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and mobile devices are deeply influencing all facets of life, directly affecting the way people experience space and time. ICTs are also tools for supporting urban development, and they have also been adopted as equipment for furnishing public spaces. Hence, ICTs have created a new paradigm of hybrid space that can be defined as Senseable Spaces. Even if there are relevant cases where the adoption of ICT has made the use of public open spaces more âsmartâ, the interrelation and the recognition of added value need to be further developed. This is one of the motivations for the research presented in this paper. The main goal of the work reported here is the deployment of a system composed of three different connected elements (a real-world infrastructure, a data gathering system, and a data processing and analysis platform) for analysis of human behavior in the open space of Cardeto Park, in Ancona, Italy. For this purpose, and because of the complexity of this task, several actions have been carried out: the deployment of a complete real-world infrastructure in Cardeto Park, the implementation of an ad-hoc smartphone application for the gathering of participantsâ data, and the development of a data pre-processing and analysis system for dealing with all the gathered data. A detailed description of these three aspects and the way in which they are connected to create a unique system is the main focus of this paper.This work has been supported by the Cost Action TU1306, called CYBERPARKS:
Fostering knowledge about the relationship between Information and Communication Technologies and Public
Spaces supported by strategies to improve their use and attractiveness, the Spanish Ministry of Economy
and Competitiveness under the ESPHIA project (ref. TIN2014-56042-JIN) and the TARSIUS project (ref.
TIN2015-71564-C4-4-R), and the Basque Country Department of Education under the BLUE project (ref.
PI-2016-0010). The authors would also like to thank the staff of UbiSive s.r.l. for the support in developing
the application
On the Feature Discovery for App Usage Prediction in Smartphones
With the increasing number of mobile Apps developed, they are now closely
integrated into daily life. In this paper, we develop a framework to predict
mobile Apps that are most likely to be used regarding the current device status
of a smartphone. Such an Apps usage prediction framework is a crucial
prerequisite for fast App launching, intelligent user experience, and power
management of smartphones. By analyzing real App usage log data, we discover
two kinds of features: The Explicit Feature (EF) from sensing readings of
built-in sensors, and the Implicit Feature (IF) from App usage relations. The
IF feature is derived by constructing the proposed App Usage Graph (abbreviated
as AUG) that models App usage transitions. In light of AUG, we are able to
discover usage relations among Apps. Since users may have different usage
behaviors on their smartphones, we further propose one personalized feature
selection algorithm. We explore minimum description length (MDL) from the
training data and select those features which need less length to describe the
training data. The personalized feature selection can successfully reduce the
log size and the prediction time. Finally, we adopt the kNN classification
model to predict Apps usage. Note that through the features selected by the
proposed personalized feature selection algorithm, we only need to keep these
features, which in turn reduces the prediction time and avoids the curse of
dimensionality when using the kNN classifier. We conduct a comprehensive
experimental study based on a real mobile App usage dataset. The results
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and show the predictive
capability for App usage prediction.Comment: 10 pages, 17 figures, ICDM 2013 short pape
Typical Phone Use Habits: Intense Use Does Not Predict Negative Well-Being
Not all smartphone owners use their device in the same way. In this work, we
uncover broad, latent patterns of mobile phone use behavior. We conducted a
study where, via a dedicated logging app, we collected daily mobile phone
activity data from a sample of 340 participants for a period of four weeks.
Through an unsupervised learning approach and a methodologically rigorous
analysis, we reveal five generic phone use profiles which describe at least 10%
of the participants each: limited use, business use, power use, and
personality- & externally induced problematic use. We provide evidence that
intense mobile phone use alone does not predict negative well-being. Instead,
our approach automatically revealed two groups with tendencies for lower
well-being, which are characterized by nightly phone use sessions.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, conference pape
Smartphone App Usage Analysis : Datasets, Methods, and Applications
As smartphones have become indispensable personal devices, the number of smartphone users has increased dramatically over the last decade. These personal devices, which are supported by a variety of smartphone apps, allow people to access Internet services in a convenient and ubiquitous manner. App developers and service providers can collect fine-grained app usage traces, revealing connections between users, apps, and smartphones. We present a comprehensive review of the most recent research on smartphone app usage analysis in this survey. Our survey summarizes advanced technologies and key patterns in smartphone app usage behaviors, all of which have significant implications for all relevant stakeholders, including academia and industry. We begin by describing four data collection methods: surveys, monitoring apps, network operators, and app stores, as well as nine publicly available app usage datasets. We then systematically summarize the related studies of app usage analysis in three domains: app domain, user domain, and smartphone domain. We make a detailed taxonomy of the problem studied, the datasets used, the methods used, and the significant results obtained in each domain. Finally, we discuss future directions in this exciting field by highlighting research challenges.Peer reviewe
Do smartphone usage scales predict behavior?
Understanding how people use technology remains important, particularly when measuring the impact this might have on individuals and society. However, despite a growing body of resources that can quantify smartphone use, research within psychology and social science overwhelmingly relies on self-reported assessments. These have yet to convincingly demonstrate an ability to predict objective behavior. Here, and for the first time, we compare a variety of smartphone use and âaddictionâ scales with objective behaviors derived from Appleâs Screen Time application. While correlations between psychometric scales and objective behavior are generally poor, single estimates and measures that attempt to frame technology use as habitual rather than âaddictiveâ correlate more favorably with subsequent behavior. We conclude that existing self-report instruments are unlikely to be sensitive enough to accurately predict basic technology use related behaviors. As a result, conclusions regarding the psychological impact of technology are unreliable when relying solely on these measures to quantify typical usage
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