1019 Phone Habits May Reveal Stress Levels, Study Says

Phone Habits May Reveal Stress Levels, Study Says

How you use your phone could reveal a lot about how stressed you are — and not just because you were searching for beachside hotels or a new job at 2 in the morning!

Researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) said they have developed a way to analyze everyday smartphone behaviors to identify a person's daily stress levels.

They've called their approach the "Smartphone Human Interaction-based Routine Behavior Task Mining, Modeling, and Feature Extraction framework," or "SHIRBT-MMF" for short.

To develop their framework, the researchers looked at data from 26 university students and office workers in their 20s and 30s who use Android phones. This group was split into 16 who took part for an average of 30 days, and 10 who took part for an average of 105 days.

Participants shared their phone data so the researchers could identify routine behaviors like chatting online, browsing, and reading and writing emails. The participants also reported daily on their stress levels.

All of this information was put together to develop a personal AI model for each participant to predict their stress levels based on their phone use.

Looking just at participants' phone use, the best-performing model was an average of 76% accurate in judging whether the 16 short-term participants were having a stressful day or not.

This dropped a little, to 74%, for the 10 longer-term participants.

Uichin Lee from KAIST said, "This study provides a foundation for converting complex smartphone records into human-understandable behavioral units and offering long-term mental health tracking more reliably."

The researchers next want to add to their work by testing their framework with more age groups, occupations and types of smartphone users to better understand how reliable it is.