Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Sep 11, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 15, 2018 - Oct 27, 2018
Date Accepted: Jan 3, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Temporal Stability of Smartphone Use Data: Determining Fundamental Time Unit and Independent Cycle
Background:
Assessing human behaviors via smartphone for monitoring the pattern of daily behaviors has become a crucial issue in this century. Thus, a more accurate and structured methodology is needed for smartphone use research.
Objective:
The study aimed to investigate the duration of data collection needed to establish a reliable pattern of use, how long a smartphone use cycle could perpetuate by assessing maximum time intervals between 2 smartphone periods, and to validate smartphone use and use/nonuse reciprocity parameters.
Methods:
Using the Know Addiction database, we selected 33 participants and passively recorded their smartphone usage patterns for at least 8 weeks. We generated 4 parameters on the basis of smartphone use episodes, including total use frequency, total use duration, proactive use frequency, and proactive use duration. A total of 3 additional parameters (root mean square of successive differences, Control Index, and Similarity Index) were calculated to reflect impaired control and compulsive use.
Results:
Our findings included (1) proactive use duration correlated with subjective smartphone addiction scores, (2) a 2-week period of data collection is required to infer a 2-month period of smartphone use, and (3) smartphone use cycles with a time gap of 4 weeks between them are highly likely independent cycles.
Conclusions:
This study validated temporal stability for smartphone use patterns recorded by a mobile app. The results may provide researchers an opportunity to investigate human behaviors with more structured methods.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© 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.