Towards Detecting and Mitigating Smartphone Habits

Smartphones have the potential to produce new habits, i.e., habitual phone usage sessions consistently associated with explicit contextual cues. Despite there is evidence that habitual smartphone use is perceived as meaningless and addictive, little is known about what such habits are, how they can be detected, and how their disruptive effect can be mitigated. In this paper, we propose a data analytic methodology based on association rule mining to automatically discover smartphone habits from smartphone usage data. By assessing the methodology with more than 130,000 smartphone sessions collected in-the-wild, we show evidence that smartphone use can be characterized by different types of complex habits, which are highly diversified across users and involve multiple apps. To promote discussion and present our future work, we introduce a mobile app that exploits the proposed methodology to assist users in monitoring and changing their smartphone habits through implementation intentions, i.e., "if-then" plans where if's are contextual cues and then's are goal-related behaviors

Designing for digital wellbeing: A research & practice agenda

Traditionally, many consumer-focused technologies have been designed to maximize user engagement with their products and services. More recently, many technology companies have begun to introduce digital wellbeing features, such as for managing time spent and for encouraging breaks in use. These are in the context of, and likely in response to, renewed concerns in the media about technology dependency and even addiction. The promotion of technology abstinence is also increasingly widespread, e.g., via digital detoxes. Given that digital technologies are an important and valuable feature of many people's lives, digital wellbeing features are arguably preferable to abstinence

EARLY STRESS DETECTION DURING PREGNANCY USING E-HEALTH IN THE PANDEMIC

Background: Women are more prone to stress during pregnancy than during the postpartum period. Stress during pregnancy is correlated with pregnancy and birth outcomes. Early detection using the e-health system is an alternative to health services during the pandemic. Aims: The research objective was to produce innovation in early stress detection using an information system based on the e-Health system. Methods: This study was conducted in the Ngaliyan Primary Healthcare Centre with 34 pregnant women. This study utilized both qualitative and quantitative research. Qualitative research used the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC), while quantitative research used an experimental design with a one-shot case study approach. Results: The e-Health system could automatically identify stress during pregnancy, with the TAM questionnaire yielding a very effective result of 85.4%. The average time needed to detect pregnant women’s stress was 230.94 seconds. This system can analyze 374 pregnant women within one day (24 hours), provide services, and report pregnant women’s stress detection results. Conclusions: The e-Health system effectively conserves time and can be used to record and report early stress in pregnant women. Keywords: early detection, information system, pregnancy, smartphone, stres

Nudging Users or Redesigning Interfaces? Evaluating Novel Strategies for Digital Wellbeing Through inControl

As web designers may deliberately adopt design patterns to hook users' attention, researchers and practitioners have innovated several tools for supporting users' digital self-control, hoping to help users self-regulate technology use - especially social networks and video streaming platforms - and achieve digital wellbeing. Unfortunately, these tools often restrict usage, e.g., through self-imposed timers and blockers, limiting interaction possibilities. This paper describes the design, development, and evaluation of two alternative strategies for digital self-control targeting the Facebook and YouTube websites. Specifically, we implemented a Chrome extension that a) highlights when the user is scrolling infinitely by progressively darkening the background (nudging strategy), and b) redesigns the homepages isolating guilty pleasure recommendations and proposing a minimalistic interface (redesign strategy). We compared the two strategies in a three-week field study with 14 participants, finding that both strategies promoted intentional use and allowed participants to decrease time spent and passive scrolling. In particular, participants liked the nudging strategy more as it supported conscious use without changing the overall user experience. We conclude with design implications for moving from traditional digital self-control tools to diverse approaches that may better support digital wellbeing in the long term

Meta Analysis of Smartphone Usage for Gratifications Obtained (2016-2019)

Smartphone is mostly used medium today in all age groups. Current study contributes by analyzing the research methodology in context of smartphone usage studies. The population of the study is the “Uses and Gratifications” researches related to smartphone usage published between 2016 and 2019. The research articles were selected by the key words of “smartphone AND gratifications” on Google Scholar and 25 articles were selected for meta-analysis to explore the objectives of approach to uses and gratifications theory, the sampling procedures, the data collection and analyses in the previous studies. It is found that smartphone is a multidimensional construct and scholars have researched them by using the holistic and the reductionist approaches. 64% studies have been found to utilize the quantitative approaches. Both mediated and offline methods are used for data collection in the previous studies. Most of the studies have used survey method. It is recommended to use the validated scales in the context of Pakistani culture

MindShift: Leveraging Large Language Models for Mental-States-Based Problematic Smartphone Use Intervention

Problematic smartphone use negatively affects physical and mental health. Despite the wide range of prior research, existing persuasive techniques are not flexible enough to provide dynamic persuasion content based on users' physical contexts and mental states. We first conduct a Wizard-of-Oz study (N=12) and an interview study (N=10) to summarize the mental states behind problematic smartphone use: boredom, stress, and inertia. This informs our design of four persuasion strategies: understanding, comforting, evoking, and scaffolding habits. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to enable the automatic and dynamic generation of effective persuasion content. We develop MindShift, a novel LLM-powered problematic smartphone use intervention technique. MindShift takes users' in-the-moment physical contexts, mental states, app usage behaviors, users' goals & habits as input, and generates high-quality and flexible persuasive content with appropriate persuasion strategies. We conduct a 5-week field experiment (N=25) to compare MindShift with baseline techniques. The results show that MindShift significantly improves intervention acceptance rates by 17.8-22.5% and reduces smartphone use frequency by 12.1-14.4%. Moreover, users have a significant drop in smartphone addiction scale scores and a rise in self-efficacy. Our study sheds light on the potential of leveraging LLMs for context-aware persuasion in other behavior change domains

From Ancient Contemplative Practice to the App Store: Designing a Digital Container for Mindfulness

Hundreds of popular mobile apps today market their ties to mindfulness. What activities do these apps support and what benefits do they claim? How do mindfulness teachers, as domain experts, view these apps? We first conduct an exploratory review of 370 mindfulness-related apps on Google Play, finding that mindfulness is presented primarily as a tool for relaxation and stress reduction. We then interviewed 15 U.S. mindfulness teachers from the therapeutic, Buddhist, and Yogic traditions about their perspectives on these apps. Teachers expressed concern that apps that introduce mindfulness only as a tool for relaxation neglect its full potential. We draw upon the experiences of these teachers to suggest design implications for linking mindfulness with further contemplative practices like the cultivation of compassion. Our findings speak to the importance of coherence in design: that the metaphors and mechanisms of a technology align with the underlying principles it follows.Comment: 10 pages (excluding references), 4 figures. To appear in the Proceedings of DIS '20: Designing Interactive Systems Conference 202

Coping with Digital Wellbeing in a Multi-Device World

While Digital Self-Control Tools (DSCTs) mainly target smartphones, more effort should be put into evaluating multi-device ecosystems to enhance digital wellbeing as users typically use multiple devices at a time. In this paper, we first review more than 300 DSCTs by demonstrating that the majority of them implements a single-device conceptualization that poorly adapts to multi-device settings. Then, we report on the results from an interview and a sketching exercise (N=20) exploring how users make sense of their multi-device digital wellbeing. Findings show that digital wellbeing issues extend beyond smartphones, with the most problematic behaviors deriving from the simultaneous usage of different devices to perform uncorrelated tasks. While this suggests the need of DSCTs that can adapt to different and multiple devices, our work also highlights the importance of learning how to properly behave with technology, e.g., through educational courses, which may be more effective than any lock-out mechanism

Patterns of Meaningful and Meaningless Smartphone Use:A Diary Study

Smartphones are highly popular, addictive everyday items which have raised concerns about over-dependency. This has led to a wealth of research on smartphone overuse albeit exploration of how habitual or phone overuse contrasts with purposeful or more meaningful use has been limited. To address this gap, this paper reports a one week diary study with 20 users. Findings highlight the distinction between pragmatic and eudemonic activities supporting meaningful use, and of hedonic activities associated with habitual use. We suggest a more nuanced conversation of habitual and meaning smartphone use. We conclude with two design implications including support for pragmatic experiences augmented with hedonic content and support for meaningful use rather than limiting meaningless use