The University of Oregon is conducting a study on the effect of phones on mental health, using Google’s Health Studies app. The goal of the study is to see how people actually use their phones and How does that affect your well-being? AN post on the company blog written by one of the principal investigators of the project say what the goal of the research will ultimately be to help companies design better products and even shape policy and education in the future.
According to the blog post, researchers are using the app because it can help them get a better idea of how people actually use their phones. unlike other studies when people are asked to track and report their own use of apps, a method that may be less precise than researchers would like. The researchers hope that this application based The approach will allow them to find relationships that other studies have missed, such as how the amount of time you spend staring at a screen actually affects your sleep. They also hope that reducing the amount of work participants will have to do will allow them to attract a larger group of people. In addition to getting bigger sample size, this might help obtain data from underserved and younger populations.
The researchers say they will collect “direct, objective measures of how people use their phones” with “continuous, passive sensing technology.” They also say their phone will be able to “directly measure many of the well-established building blocks of wellness, like sleep and physical activity.” If you have a Fitbit, you can also choose to share some data from it. According to Google spokesman Iz Conroy, the system uses “some of the same APIs as” Android. built-in digital wellness system that tracks how you use your phone, but the “data is collected separately under transparent research protocols.” Conroy used the number of times he unlocks his phone and the categories of apps he uses as examples of what kind of data the study will collect.
The post says that users will need to give “informed consent” to participate and that the data “will be managed according to strict ethical standards and will only be used for research and to inform better products.” It explicitly says that the data “will never be sold or used for advertising purposes.”
The Health Studies app was introduced December 2020 with a study of respiratory diseases. People can use the app to register as study participants, where it will collect their data and aggregate it so researchers can see demographic trends but not an individual’s personal information. If you are interested in contributing to the digital wellbeing study, you can download the app from play store and sign up to participate in the study when it launches on Friday, May 27. The study will track your phone usage and health patterns over four weeks.
