I just published a substantial paper on the viability of using smartphone interactions for addiction evaluation in Elsevier‘s Pervasive and Mobile Computing.

The study highlights a novel methodology to transform and analyse large amounts of interaction events to infer a user’s level of smartphone addiction. This is a step forward from using commonly used metrics such as pure screen on time which can misrepresent the cognitive complexities and dependencies of human behaviour.

Additionally, we find that session to session behaviour shows a lot of variance. From this we conclude that, even with a stable user trait such as addiction, users display problematic use patterns in only a subset of all their sessions.

While the paper is still in pre-press stage as of now, you can already find it here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pmcj.2022.101677