Mobile Application to Address Smartphone Addiction Based on the Engagement of Parents and Children: A Randomized Controlled Trial (Preprint)

Abstract

With the increase in the penetration rate of smartphones, smartphone addiction, which heightens the use of smartphones, has become a social problem.

The aim of this study was to develop and verify the effectiveness of an application that builds an environment in which children voluntarily tackle smartphone addiction.

We developed an application (Smart-Use) that scores and evaluates the use of smartphones in a fully automated manner and conducts evaluation experiments in a real environment. Smart-Use is installed on parent and child's smartphones and initially registered by the parent and child, and it automatically collects usage logs and calculates scores. It prevents parents from directly viewing their children's usage history and has the advantage of guiding smartphone use while maintaining privacy, unlike existing applications for addressing smartphone addiction. The Smart-Use system involves a feature that suggests pocket money bonuses for to the child to parents based on the child's scores. The bonuses serve as motivation for children to improve their smartphone use, and parents can use these bonuses to encourage their children to use Smart-Use, thus enabling operation while maintaining good parent–child engagement. The experiment in this study was a web-based randomized controlled trial (RCT), with participants divided into two groups: a Smart-Use user group (intervention group) and a non-user group (control group) (intervention group: 13 parents, nine children; control group: 21 parents, 14 children). Participants were parents and children who used smartphones for at least one hour per day and were recruited online through a research firm. All outcomes were obtained based on usage logs of their smartphone and a self-assessment questionnaire via the internet. After the experiment, the transition of smartphone use time during the experiment and the results of the Smartphone Addiction Scale Short Version in Japanese (SAS-SV-J) were evaluated as primary outcomes.

The results of a t-test of the average usage times of the children in each group showed that the children's p-value of average smartphone usage times in the week before our application use was p = 0.5273 (> 0.05) and in the fourth week after using the application was p = 0.0008 (< 0.05), showing a significant difference and average decrease of more than 50 minutes. However, the application had no effect on the parents’ smartphone use. In addition, there was no significant difference between the pre-experiment and post-experiment SAS-SV-J scores of the parents and children.

Smart-Use effectively decreased the time that children spent on their smartphones. However, there is room for improvement in further enhancing the effect and determining more precise scores.