How age and gender affect smartphone usage

Abstract

Smartphone usage is a hot topic in pervasive computing due to their popularity and personal aspect. We present our initial results from analyzing how individual differences, such as gender and age, affect smartphone usage. The dataset comes from a large scale longitudinal study, the Menthal project. We select a sample of 30, 677 participants, from which 16, 147 are males and 14, 523 are females, with a median age of 21 years. These have been tracked for at least 28 days and they have submitted their demographic data through a questionnaire. The ongoing experiment has been started in January 2014 and we have used our own mobile data collection and analysis framework. Females use smartphones for longer periods than males, with a daily mean of 166.78 minutes vs. 154.26 minutes. Younger participants use their phones longer and usage is directed towards entertainment and social interactions through specialized apps. Older participants use it less and mainly for getting information or using it as a classic phone.