Mitigating Smartphone Distractions in Group Activities with Lock n’ LoL

KAIST researchers have developed an application that helps people restrain themselves from using smartphones during meetings or social gatherings. The app’s group limit mode forces users to curtail their smartphone usage through peer-pressure while offering flexibility to use the phone in emergencies.

Article  |  Spring 2017

Smartphones allow people to conveniently access information and interact with others at anytime and anywhere. However, smartphones are considered as a major source of distraction in social gatherings such as family dinners, meetings, and group study sessions. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, most people agree that smartphones are disruptive to social interaction. The problem is that smartphone usage is hard to resist, even with social norms of smartphone etiquette, due to the ease of access and expectation of constant connectivity.

Professor Uichin Lee of the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and his research team have recently introduced a solution to this problem by developing an app, Lock n’ LoL (Lock Your Smartphone and Laugh Out Loud), to help people lock their smartphones altogether and keep from using their phones while engaging in social activities.

Researchers note that the overuse of smartphones often results from users’ habitual checking of messages, emails, or other online contents such as status updates from Facebook. External stimuli, for example, notification alarms, add to smartphone distractions and interruptions in group interactions.

Lock n’ LoL allows users to create a virtual room and select the purpose of a group activity (e.g., studying and socializing). Then users can invite participants to join the room by sharing the room ID. Any users who agree to join this room are automatically putting their phones into lock mode. All alarms and notifications are muted, and any app launches are blocked, except receiving incoming calls. In the case of emergencies, a participant can temporarily leave the room to access their phone for up to five minutes. If this timer expires, the user is brought back to the room, and mobile phone access becomes restricted again.

In addition, the app’s Co-location Reminder detects nearby friends and sends push alarms to encourage app users to limit their phone use with their friends. Lock n’ LoL also displays important statistics to help users to review their behaviors such as the current week’s total limit time, the weekly average usage time, top friends ranked by time spent together offline, and top activities in which the users participated.

The team introduced the Lock n’ LoL campaign throughout the KAIST campus for one month in 2015, with more than 1,000 students participating. As a result, they discovered that students accumulated more than 10,000 hours in the lock modes. The students said that they were able to focus more on their group activities. A regression analysis was conducted to understand to how use-limiting behavioral characteristics were related to an individual’s engagement such as daily use limiting duration and frequency. The results indicated that while the regularity of the limiting events was important for the limit duration, the diversity of the limiting situations (e.g., time, places, and purposes) was a stronger predictor of the limiting behaviors. Users who frequently locked their phones tended to do so in diverse situations rather than frequent trials in limited situations.

Professor Lee said, “Currently, most prior studies focused on usability and accessibility of mobile technologies, but dealing with the negative aspects has received much less attention so far. In an age of the Internet of Things, we expect that distractions and addictions will emerge as a serious social concern, and our Lock n’ LoL has laid stepping stones for addressing this issue through technology.”

This work was presented at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2016), which is the premier conference in the field of human-computer interaction, held in May 2016 in San Jose, USA. Professor Lee and his team received the Best Paper Award with their contribution to novel social computing systems design and analysis.

Minsam Ko, Seungwoo Choi, Koji Yatani, Uichin Lee, “Lock n’ LoL: Group-based Limiting Assistance App to Mitigate Smartphone Distractions in Group Activities,” ACM CHI 2016, San Jose, CA, USA, May 7-12 (Best Paper Award)

For more informaton, please listen to the interview with Prof. Uichin Lee.
http://www.kaist.ac.kr/Upl/downfile/S07E08_20170424.mp3