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Raising Awareness of Smartphone Overuse among University Students: A Persuasive Systems Approach

Smartphone overuse can lead to a series of physical, mental and social disturbances. This problem is more prevalent among young adults as compared to other demographic groups. Additionally, university students are already undergoing high cognitive loads and stress conditions; therefore, they are more susceptible to smartphone addiction and its derived problems. In this paper, we present a novel approach where a conversational mobile agent uses persuasive messages exploring the reflective mind to raise users’ awareness of their usage and consequently induce reduction behaviors. We conducted a four-week study with 16 university students undergoing stressful conditions—a global lockdown during their semester—and evaluated the impact of the agent on smartphone usage reduction and the perceived usefulness of such an approach. Results show the efficacy of self-tracking in the behavior change process: 81% of the users reduced their usage time, and all of them mentioned that having a conversational agent alerting them about their usage was useful. Before this experiment, only 68% of them considered such an approach could be useful. In conclusion, users deemed it essential to have an engaging conversational agent on their smartphones, in terms of helping them become more aware of usage times.