GoldenTime: Exploring System-Driven Timeboxing and Micro-Financial Incentives for Self-Regulated Phone Use

MindPhone: Mindful Reflection at Unlock Can Reduce Absentminded Smartphone Use

“…Forest 5 is a mobile app that aims to regulate smartphone use by planting both virtual and physical trees. GoldenTime [38] is a study aimed at providing micro-fnancial incentives for adhering to time-boxed smartphone use. Moreover, interventions such as Let's FOCUS [21] and Lockn'Lol [24] aim to inhibit smartphone use for a group of people and turn this into a social event of its own.…”

Loss-Framed Adaptive Microcontingency Management for Preventing Prolonged Sedentariness: Development and Feasibility Study

“…In addition to the prevention of gaming behavior, another reason for using the loss-framed incentive is that the loss-framed incentive is more likely to elicit behavior change than the gain-framed incentive because of people’s tendency to place a greater emphasis on losses than gains, as stated by the prospect theory [ 43 ]. In practice, previous studies have demonstrated a better effect of the loss-framed incentive on health outcomes than the gain-framed incentive in a variety of intervention domains, including mitigating smartphone overuse [ 23 ], promoting physical activity [ 35 ], and improving driving behavior [ 26 ].…”

“…Another aspect of incentive design that should be considered is the delay between behavior occurrence and incentive delivery, with a shorter delay having shown greater effectiveness in eliciting behavior change [ 18 , 33 ]. Other potential contributors to the effectiveness of contingency management include incentive framing (eg, providing incentives for positive behaviors vs deducting expenses for negative behaviors) [ 23 , 26 , 34 , 35 ], incentive magnitude adjustments throughout the intervention [ 20 , 34 , 36 , 37 ], and incentive magnitude certainty (eg, fixed vs lottery incentives) [ 4 , 12 , 38 ].…”

“…For example, positive behavior was not immediately rewarded, and only behavioral outcomes from long-term behavior adherence were rewarded at the end of an intervention (eg, lump-sum provision) [ 7 , 21 ]. In addition, incentive magnitudes were often fixed [ 23 , 39 ] or randomly sampled from a predefined range of incentives [ 4 , 38 ] (ie, they did not change by context at the individual level). Moreover, although several studies have proposed an escalating reinforcer where incentive magnitudes increase at each positive behavior occurrence [ 20 , 34 , 36 , 37 ], such a design requires intervention practitioners to configure a detailed plan manually (eg, the amount of incentive increment) based on their domain knowledge.…”

“…A representative behavioral therapy that uses extrinsic motivation is contingency management, which provides external rewards (typically financial incentives) contingent on the occurrence of behaviors of interest for reinforcing positive behavior change [3]. Such a therapeutic approach has already shown effectiveness on behavior change in various fields, including physical activity promotion and dietary tracking [4][5][6][7][8][9], prevention of drug abuse [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17], smoking cessation [18][19][20][21][22], productivity and academic performance [23][24][25], and driving behavior [26,27]. In addition to its application in academic fields, companies also use financial incentives as core motivators for behavior changes, such as health insurance discount programs for healthy behaviors [28] and a commitment contract that allows the company to send money from a user's account to a particular person or organization (eg, charities) if one fails to reach a self-defined goal [29].…”