Smartphone usage in the wild

Abstract

This paper presents a large-scale analysis of contextualized smartphone usage in real life. We introduce two contextual variables that condition the use of smartphone applications, namely places and social context. Our study shows strong dependencies between phone usage and the two contextual cues, which are automatically extracted based on multiple built-in sensors available on the phone. By analyzing continuous data collected on a set of 77 participants from a European country over 9 months of actual usage, our framework automatically reveals key patterns of phone application usage that would traditionally be obtained through manual logging or questionnaire. Our findings contribute to the large-scale understanding of applications and context, bringing out design implications for interfaces on smartphones.

Using Mobile Phone Sensor Technology for Mental Health Research: Integrated Analysis to Identify Hidden Challenges and Potential Solutions (Preprint)

“…In the evening, the number of known devices tends to stabilize while the number of unknown devices gradually decreases. This pattern largely matches that observed by Do et al [26], although overall the number of devices that are detected in our study is lower. This may partly because we only recorded Bluetooth from smartphone devices while filtering out other Bluetooth devices.…”

“…In contrast, in the current study sensor data was collected from participants living within Australia who are unlikely to have social connections each other. We therefore followed procedures in Do et al [26] for analysing Bluetooth data in a real-world setting as a gauge of social connectedness. Instead of using Bluetooth to assessing social connection between participants, Bluetooth is used to make a coarse estimate of human density around the user, which provides a rough proxy for social context.…”

“…However, by assessing recurring patterns of detected devices, Bluetooth data can still be used as a proxy for the social context of participants [26]. When assessing the number of smartphone devices that are detected, we observed a large variability between participants, both in the total number of devices that are detected and the ratio of known and unknown devices (Fig.…”

Exploring Smartphone Addiction: Insights from Long-Term Telemetric Behavioral Measures

“…According to recent statistics, over one billion people worldwide own at least one of these devices [1] and they use them for a wide number of tasks, from placing a phone call to checking email, surfing the web, and listening to music [2]. These technologies have been adopted at a rate faster than any other in history [3] and the web is currently accessed more from smartphones than any other type of device [4].…”

Internet data budget allocation policies for diverse smartphone applications

“…A typical smartphone is capable of running several applications concurrently (e.g., navigation, email, browser, dating, and communication) [6][7][8], in addition to other built-in functionalities such as music player, camera, and sensors [9][10][11][12][13][14]. Mobile devices including smartphones could be the predominant digital device for future daily use, as it allows users to access the Internet and their data anywhere anytime [15][16][17]. Thus, it is important to ensure that next-generation mobile communications are cost efficient and secure and provide high quality of service and experience.…”