Smartphone usage behavior between depressed and non-depressed students: An exploratory study in the context of Bangladesh

Abstract

Increasing smartphone usage has received much scholarly attention to investigate its impact on mental health. To our best knowledge, none of the previous studies have explored smartphone usage behavior of depressed students. In this study, using 7 days' actual smartphone usage data of 44 students, we present the smartphone usage behavior that varies between depressed and non-depressed students. Our findings show that in terms of aggregated smartphone usage data, these two groups of students use similar number of apps. However, depressed students' frequency of launch per app is significantly higher. Moreover, they use Communication category apps more and their diurnal usage pattern is also significantly different. Therefore, our findings show the possibility to differentiate depressed and non-depressed students based on their smartphone usage data.