“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.