How often do you use your smartphone ? Are you actually addicted to it? Now, an Android app developed by a team from the University of Bonn can tell you details about your relationship with your beloved device, as well as study your habits on it. And its name is Menthal .
The project was created by a team of psychologists and computer scientists from the German university, led by Alexander Markowetz, who initially studied the smartphone habits 50 students for six weeks. The research showed that, during this time, more than a quarter of the students used their smartphones for more than two hours each day and checked their phones an average of 80 times a day – that’s every twelve minutes.
Menthal app on Android
Now, the researchers want to expand their research further to include statistics from a significantly larger sample of people. So they created a free Android app, Menthal, that can track your smartphone usage and perform related measurements.
The Menthal tells you how much time you spend on your phone each day and which apps you use the most. It sends anonymous results to the research team every day, as long as you're connected to a Wi-Fi network.
By gathering data from the app, the researchers want to study, among other things, whether a smartphone can ultimately be a diagnostic tool for serious illnesses, such as depression, or to examine how serious someone's addiction to their cell phone can be and what it can cause.
You can download the Menthal from the Google Play Store or the relevant University website , if you have Android version 4.0 of Google's operating system or higher.
Source: digitallife.gr
