EYES: Estimating Youth's Exposure to Mobile Screens - Project Summary/Abstract Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have become integral to children's daily lives, raising concerns about their long-term effects. The evidence regarding their impact on children’s development and health outcomes remains conflicting, emphasizing the need for refined and reliable methods to measure screen time. Traditional self-reports, including parent-reported data, are often unreliable as they fail to capture the sporadic and intermittent nature of mobile device use, particularly as children increasingly use these devices independently. While recent advancements in passive sensing offer an alternative, they cannot distinguish between multiple users, which is a critical limitation given the high prevalence of device sharing among families with young children. Therefore, developing methods that accurately identify who is using a device is essential for conducting reliable research on the impact of mobile screen use on children's health and development. To address this gap, this project proposes a method for estimating children's exposure to mobile screens by identifying when a target child is using a device, leveraging data from built-in sensors in tablets, smartphones, and smartwatches. Specifically, the project aims to: (i) develop methods to determine a child’s screen time based on app usage and motion data from the mobile device alone and evaluate them under emulated free-living conditions; (ii) develop methods that incorporate app usage data from the mobile device, motion data from both the device and the smartwatch worn on the child’s wrist, and proximity data between the device and the watch, and evaluate them under emulated free-living conditions; and (iii) assess the feasibility of deploying the system in real-world settings by evaluating its performance at a childcare center and analyzing its energy consumption requirements and overall coverage. These distinct aims will provide public health researchers with insights into resource requirements and corresponding performance outcomes in assessing children’s screen use. This study is significant as it addresses key limitations in current methods for measuring children's mobile screen use. By enabling continuous identification of the device user and capturing short bouts of media use that characterize children's screen behavior, it enhances measurement accuracy. A more precise assessment of mobile screen use is essential for understanding the complex relationship between children's screen exposure and their health and developmental outcomes. This project is also innovative, as it is among the first to integrate app usage, motion, and proximity data from mobile devices and smartwatches to track children's screen use. By combining these diverse data streams, the approach provides a holistic and synergistic view of user behavior, including app interactions, device movements, and spatial relationships between the device and smartwatch. Overall, this project offers a cost-effective, scalable solution for assessing children's screen use patterns over time while enhancing usability for both researchers and participants, making it well-suited for long-term and large- scale research studies on children's mobile screen exposure and its impact on their wellbeing.
