Analyzing the longitudinal impact of proximity, location, and personality on smartphone usage

Abstract

Background: Over the past few years, mobile devices, particularly smartphones have seen dramatic increases in data consumption. The significant increases in data usage have placed tremendous strain on the wireless infrastructure, necessitating research across a variety of optimization, efficiency, and capacity improvements. Complementary to those research efforts is the acquisition of a better understanding of what aspects drive user smartphone usage. Methods: In this paper, we leverage the unique characteristics of the NetSense study, a longitudinal study covering three years of a large cohort of smartphone users, to demonstrate how proximity, location, and individual differences (e.g., personality) can play an important role in understanding smartphone usage over time. We analyze the longitudinal impact of proximity density, personality, and location on smartphone traffic consumption. Results and Discussion: We show that friendship proximity (i.e., SMS contacts and Facebook friendship) has a significant impact on traffic consumption and personality tends to impact application preference / consumption; However, the true behavior might not be presented due to restrictions of network connectivity. Applications can have significantly different contextual usages based on the location. Conclusions: We believe our study raises the importance of considering proximity, personality, and location as context relevant for the purposes of assessing user data consumption.