JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Smartphone-based monitoring in natural settings provides opportunities to monitor mental health behaviors, including suicidal thoughts and behavior.

Objective:

To use passively collected smartphone state logs to estimate daily smartphone screen time characteristics in people with suicidal thinking, offering a more reliable method compared to traditional self-report surveys.

Methods:

Participants (n=126; median age 22 years) installed the Beiwe app on their smartphones, which passively collected phone state logs for up to 6 months after discharge from an inpatient psychiatric unit (adolescents) or emergency department visit (adults). We derived daily measures of screen-on time from these logs and compared those measures between the first four weeks and subsequent weeks. Additionally, we estimated the impact of a daylight time change on minute-level screen time using function-on-scalar generalized linear mixed-effects regression.

Results:

The median monitoring period was 169 days (range 42-169). For adolescents and adults, average daily screen-on time was 255.1 and 271.0 minutes, average daily screen-on bout duration was 4.2 and 5.0 minutes, and average daily screen-off bout duration was 25.4 and 26.9 minutes, respectively; there were no significant differences between smartphone operating systems. The daily measures were not significantly different for the first four weeks compared to the fifth week onwards. We observed a statistically significant effect of daylight time change on minute-level screen time.

Conclusions:

Passively collected phone logs offer an alternative to self-report measures for studying smartphone screen time characteristics in people with suicidal thinking. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of this approach, opening doors for further research on the associations between daily screen time, mental health, and other factors.