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Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth

Date Submitted: May 20, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: May 21, 2018 - Jun 28, 2018
Date Accepted: Aug 27, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

A Novel Approach to Evaluating Mobile Smartphone Screen Time for iPhones: Feasibility and Preliminary Findings

Gower AD, Moreno MA

A Novel Approach to Evaluating Mobile Smartphone Screen Time for iPhones: Feasibility and Preliminary Findings

JMIR Mhealth Uhealth 2018;6(11):e11012

DOI: 10.2196/11012

PMID: 30455163

PMCID: 6277825

A Novel Approach to Evaluating Mobile Smartphone Screen Time for iPhones: Feasibility and Preliminary Findings

  • Aubrey D Gower; 
  • Megan A Moreno

ABSTRACT

Background:

Increasingly high levels of smartphone ownership and use pose the potential risk for addictive behaviors and negative health outcomes, particularly among younger populations. Previous methodologies to understand mobile screen time have relied on self-report surveys or ecological momentary assessments (EMAs). Self-report is subject to bias and unreliability, while EMA can be burdensome to participants. Thus, a new methodology is needed to advance the understanding of mobile screen time.

Objective:

The objective of this study was to test the feasibility of a novel methodology to record and evaluate mobile smartphone screen time and use: battery use screenshot (BUS).

Methods:

The BUS approach, defined for this study as uploading a mobile phone screenshot of a specific page within a smartphone, was utilized within a Web-based cross-sectional survey of adolescents aged 12-15 years through the survey platform Qualtrics. Participants were asked to provide a screenshot of their battery use page, a feature within an iPhone, to upload within the Web-based survey. Feasibility was assessed by smartphone ownership and response rate to the BUS upload request. Data availability was evaluated as apps per BUS, completeness of data within the screenshot, and five most used apps based on battery use percentage.

Results:

Among those surveyed, 26.73% (309/1156) indicated ownership of a smartphone. A total of 105 screenshots were evaluated. For data availability, screenshots contained an average of 10.2 (SD 2.0) apps per screenshot and over half (58/105, 55.2%) had complete data available. The most common apps or functions included Safari and Home and Lock Screen.

Conclusions:

Study findings describe the BUS as a novel approach for real-time data collection focused on iPhone screen time and use among young adolescents. Although feasibility showed some challenges in the upload capacity of young teens, data availability was generally strong across this large dataset. These data from screenshots have the potential to provide key insights into precise mobile smartphone screen use and time spent per mobile app. Future studies could explore the use of the BUS methodology on other mobile smartphones such as Android phones to correlate mobile smartphone screen time with health outcomes.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Gower AD, Moreno MA

A Novel Approach to Evaluating Mobile Smartphone Screen Time for iPhones: Feasibility and Preliminary Findings

JMIR Mhealth Uhealth 2018;6(11):e11012

DOI: 10.2196/11012

PMID: 30455163

PMCID: 6277825

Per the author's request the PDF is not available.

© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.