Passively sensing smartphone use in teens with rates of use by sex and across operating systems

Abstract

Youth screen media activity is a growing concern, though few studies include objective usage data. Through the longitudinal, U.S.-based Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, youth (m_age = 14; n = 1415) self-reported their typical smartphone use and passively recorded three weeks of smartphone use via the ABCD-specific Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS) application. Here we describe and validate passively-sensed smartphone keyboard and app use measures, provide code to harmonize measures across operating systems, and describe trends in adolescent smartphone use. Keyboard and app-use measures were reliable and positively correlated with one another (r = 0.33) and with self-reported use (rs = 0.21-0.35). Participants recorded a mean of 5 h of daily smartphone use, which is two more hours than they self-reported. Further, females logged more smartphone use than males. Smartphone use was recorded at all hours, peaking on average from 8 to 10 PM and lowest from 3 to 5 AM. Social media and texting apps comprised nearly half of all use. Data are openly available to approved investigators ( https://nda.nih.gov/abcd/ ). Information herein can inform use of the ABCD dataset to longitudinally study health and neurodevelopmental correlates of adolescent smartphone use.

Keywords: Adolescents; Android; Passive sensing; Screen media activity; Screen time; Smartphone use; iOS.

Figure 1

Average smartphone use (app use and keystrokes) by time of day. Passively sensed keystrokes and app use by hour of the day across the full duration of the study. Shaded bands represent 95% confidence intervals. Passively sensed app use was only captured for participants with Android smartphones while passively sensed keystrokes include both Apple and Android participants.

Figure 2

Proportion of app use by category across data sources. Proportion of daily overall application use by category, as measured by average daily app use, average daily keystrokes, and self-reported smartphone use on the Screen Time Questionnaire for their own usage of each category. Only categories representing more than 1% of daily average use are plotted (categories representing less than 1% of daily smartphone use include “Business”, “Education”, “Finance”, “Food”, “Art”, “Health”, “Lifestyle”, “Maps”, “News”, “Medical”, “Shopping”, “Sports”, “Travel”, and “Weather”).

Figure 3

Average daily app use for by female (n = 208) and male (n = 292) for Android using participants. *Sex difference at p < 0.05 *** sex difference at p < 0.001.