The authors explore patterns of smartphone use during the first weeks following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in Belgium, focusing on citizens’ use of smartphones to consume news and to communicate and interact with others. Unique smartphone tracking data from 2,778 Flemish adults reveal that at the height of the outbreak, people used their smartphone on average 45 minutes (28 percent) more than before the outbreak. The number of smartphone pickups remained fairly stable over this period. This means that on average, users did not turn to their smartphones more frequently but used them longer to access news (54 percent increase), social media apps (72 percent increase), messaging apps (64 percent increase), and the voice call feature (44 percent increase). These smartphone use patterns suggest that smartphones are key instruments that help citizens stay informed, in sync, and in touch with society during times of crisis.

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The ever-connected world created by smartphones has led to initiatives like a 'digital detox', in which smartphone users consciously disconnect from email, social media and internet in general for a certain period of time. Since research based on subjective self-reports indicates that extensive smartphone usage and stress are often related, we checked whether a digital detox is effectively associated with a decrease in stress in the short-term and whether this could be measured with objective markers of both smartphone usage and physiological stress. More particularly, we monitored participants for two consecutive weeks: one week of normal smartphone usage and one week of digital detox. We asked them to continuously wear a state-of-the-art wristband device, measuring physiological stress based on skin conductance (SC). In addition, we developed an app called 'mobileDNA' to capture detailed information on which apps participants use throughout the day and how much time they spend on them. Although this was a pilot study with a rather low sample size, we found decreased levels of stress during a digital detox week. This finding provides evidence that a digital detox can be an interesting coping mechanism for people experiencing problematic smartphone usage and that further and more extensive research with our methodology has a lot of potential in the future.