Diversity and End User Context in Smartphone Usage Sessions

Mobile end user context has gained increasing attention in the mobile services industry. Context information is seen as an important component in developing new, more personalized, mobile services and applications. This paper studies the effect of end user context on smart phone usage sessions. Smart phone usage sessions are used to depict user behavior and usage habits of smart phone users on a high level. We have detected end user contexts, and extracted smart phone usage session information from handset-based data of 140 smart phone users. We first examine and describe usage sessions as such, and then in different end user contexts. According to our usage session analysis, smart phone usage is highly diversified across users. For example, the average number of sessions per day ranges from 3 to 46. Characteristics of smart phone usage sessions differ in different end user contexts. For example, an average session is 37 % longer in the Home-context than in the Office-context, but Office has 56 % more sessions per time unit than Home. The results imply that mobile services and applications need to adapt to user behavior in order to be personalized enough, and that context awareness is indeed a worthwhile step towards this.