“Leave your smartphone out of bed”: quantitative analysis of smartphone use effect on sleep quality

Abstract

Smartphones have become an integral part of people’s everyday lives. Smartphones are used across all household locations, including in the bed at night. Smartphone screens and other displays emit blue light, and exposure to blue light can affect one’s sleep quality. Thus, smartphone use prior to bedtime could disrupt the quality of one’s sleep, but research lacks quantitative studies on how smartphone use can influence sleep. This study combines smartphone application use data from 75 participants with sleep data collected by a wearable ring. On average, the participants used their smartphones in bed for 322.8 s (5 min and 22.8 s), with an IQR of 43.7–456. Participants spent an average of 42% of their time in bed using their smartphones (IQR of 5.87–55.5%). Our findings indicate that smartphone use in bed has significant adverse effects on sleep latency, awake time, average heart rate, and HR variability. We also find that smartphone use does not decrease sleep quality when used outside of bed. Our results indicate that intense smartphone use alone does not negatively affect well-being. Since all smartphone users do not use their phones in the same way, extending the investigation to different smartphone use types might yield more information than general smartphone use. In conclusion, this paper presents the first investigation of the association between smartphone application use logs and detailed sleep metrics. Our work also validates previous research results and highlights emerging future work.

Night-time smartphone use, sleep duration, sleep quality, and menstrual disturbances in young adult women: A population-based study with high-resolution tracking data

“…This would allow evaluation of the effects of smartphone activity mediated by for example, short sleep duration or sleep disturbances. Smartphone use in bed prior to sleep should also be considered as decreased sleep quality and increased sleep latency, heart rate, and awakenings during sleep hours are observed effects of in-bed smartphone use prior to sleep [ 35 ].…”

Assessment of the Excessive Rehearses of Smartphones Affected Symptoms on Sound Health of University Students in Bangladesh

“…The research was conducted to find out the effects of sleeping using a smartphone before going to bed. The result of research stated that using a smartphone before bed significantly impairs the duration of sleep, wake time, average blood pressure, and HR fluctuation (Kheirinejad et al, 2023). Another study about mobile addiction, depression, and related factors in medical students near the age of 20 years in Thailand was analyzed by applying multiple regression.…”

“…It affects health hazards like sleeping problems, reduced physical fitness, the habit of eating unhealthy foods, pain, migraines, depression, anxiety, drug addiction, addiction to social networking, and so on. (Kheirinejad et al, 2023;Kumar et al, 2011;Mengistu et al, 2023;Rathakrishnan et al, 2021;Shaheen et al, 2015;Tyagi et al, 2021;Vasudev et al, 2012;Wacks & Weinstein, 2021;Wang et al, 2019;Wattanaudomchai et al, 2023), and influences addictive behavior (Billieux et al, 2015;Servidio et al, 2022;Wattanaudomchai et al, 2023) decreasing face to face conversation with relatives and result increasing loneliness (Kim, 2017;Shaheen et al, 2015). Different types of diseases like heart diseases, effects on the fetus, alzherian's disease, Parkinson's disease, brain tumor, male infertility, and ear impairment, digital eye strain were caused by excessive use of mobile phones (Chowdhury et al, 2019;Mohan et al, 2021;Suhag et al, 2016;Tyagi et al, 2021).…”

Exploring mHealth applications for self-management of chronic low back pain: A survey of features and benefits

“…mHealth solutions are commonly used in public healthcare and health services, where they are appreciated for their ease of use, broad reach, and wide acceptance [2] . Smartphones have become an integral part of people's everyday lives [3] , and mHealth applications are also almost available 24/7 and do not have geographical limitations for people from remote and rural areas [1] , [4] , [5] . They could even benefit vulnerable people more in self-managing their pain without being bothered and wasting time and money [6] .…”