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.