The Impact of Covid-19 on Smartphone Usage

Tong Li; Mingyang Zhang; Yong Li; Eemil Lagerspetz; Sasu Tarkoma; Pan Hui

doi:10.1109/JIOT.2021.3073864

The Impact of Covid-19 on Smartphone Usage

IEEE Internet Things J. 2021 Apr 16;8(23):16723-16733. doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2021.3073864. eCollection 2021 Dec.

Authors

Tong Li^{1

2}, Mingyang Zhang¹, Yong Li³, Eemil Lagerspetz², Sasu Tarkoma², Pan Hui^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ System and Media LaboratoryDepartment of Computer Science and EngineeringHong Kong University of Science and Technology Hong Kong.
² Department of Computer ScienceUniversity of Helsinki 00100 Helsinki Finland.
³ Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and TechnologyDepartment of Electronic EngineeringTsinghua University Beijing 100084 China.

Abstract

The outbreak of Covid-19 changed the world as well as human behavior. In this article, we study the impact of Covid-19 on smartphone usage. We gather smartphone usage records from a global data collection platform called Carat, including the usage of mobile users in North America from November 2019 to April 2020. We then conduct the first study on the differences in smartphone usage across the outbreak of Covid-19. We discover that Covid-19 leads to a decrease in users' smartphone engagement and network switches, but an increase in WiFi usage. Also, its outbreak causes new typical diurnal patterns of both memory usage and WiFi usage. Additionally, we investigate the correlations between smartphone usage and daily confirmed cases of Covid-19. The results reveal that memory usage, WiFi usage, and network switches of smartphones have significant correlations, whose absolute values of Pearson coefficients are greater than 0.8. Moreover, smartphone usage behavior has the strongest correlation with the Covid-19 cases occurring after it, which exhibits the potential of inferring outbreak status. By conducting extensive experiments, we demonstrate that for the inference of outbreak stages, both Macro-F1 and Micro-F1 can achieve over 0.8. Our findings explore the values of smartphone usage data for fighting against the epidemic.

Keywords: Correlations; Covid-19; outbreak stage inference; smartphone usage.

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the Project 16214817 from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong; in part by Project FP805 from HKUST; in part by the 5GEAR Project, the FIT Project, and the CBAI (Crowdsourced Battery Optimization AI for a Connected World, Grant 1319017) Project from the Academy of Finland; in part by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2020YFA0711403; in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant U1936217, Grant 61971267, Grant 61972223, Grant 61941117, and Grant 61861136003; in part by the Beijing Natural Science Foundation under Grant L182038; in part by the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology under Grant 20031887521; and in part by the Research Fund of Tsinghua University-Tencent Joint Laboratory for Internet Innovation Technology.