skip to main content
research-article

Smartwatch Wearing Behavior Analysis: A Longitudinal Study

Published: 11 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Smartwaches are the representative wearable or body-worn devices that provide convenient and easy information access. There is a growing body of research work on enabling novel interaction techniques and understanding user experiences of smartwatches. However, there is still lack of user experience research on wearing behaviors of smartwatches, which is critical for wearable device and service design. In this work, we investigate how college students wear smartwatches and what factors affect wearing behaviors by analyzing a longitudinal activity dataset collected from 50 smartwatch users for 203 days. Our results show that there are several temporal usage patterns and distinct groups of usage patterns. The factors affecting wearing behaviors are contextual, nuanced, and multifaceted. Our findings provide diverse design implications for improving wearability of smartwatches and leveraging smartwatches for behavioral changes.

References

[1]
Apple, Inc. 2016. Our Heart Rate. What It Means, and Where on Apple Watch You’ll Find it. (2016). https://support.apple.com/enca/HT204666.
[2]
Apple, Inc. 2016. UIApplicationBackgroundFetchIntervalMinimum. (2016). https://developer.apple.com/reference/uikit/uiapplicationbackgroundfetchintervalminimum.
[3]
Daniel L. Ashbrook. 2010. Enabling Mobile Microinteractions. Ph.D. Dissertation. Atlanta, GA, USA. Advisor(s) Starner, Thad E. AAI3414437.
[4]
Steve Benford, Chris Greenhalgh, Gabriella Giannachi, Brendan Walker, Joe Marshall, and Tom Rodden. 2013. Uncomfortable User Experience. Commun. ACM 56, 9 (Sept. 2013), 66--73.
[5]
Yannick Bernaerts, Matthias Druwé, Sebastiaan Steensels, Jo Vermeulen, and Johannes Schöning. 2014. The Office Smartwatch: Development and Design of a Smartwatch App to Digitally Augment Interactions in an Office Environment. In Proceedings of the 2014 Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS Companion ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 41--44.
[6]
Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt. 1997. Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. Morgan Kaufmann.
[7]
Andreas Bulling, Ulf Blanke, and Bernt Schiele. 2014. A Tutorial on Human Activity Recognition Using Body-worn Inertial Sensors. ACM Comput. Surv. 46, 3, Article 33 (Jan. 2014), 33 pages.
[8]
Canalys 2016. Media Alert: Smart Watch Market Grows 60% in Q3 2016 as Apple Ships 2.8 Million Units. (2016). https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/media-alert-smart-watch-market-grows-60-q3-2016-apple-ships-28-million-units.
[9]
Marta E. Cecchinato, Anna L. Cox, and Jon Bird. 2015. Smartwatches: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2133--2138.
[10]
Jaewon Choi and Seongcheol Kim. 2016. Is the Smartwatch an IT Product or a Fashion Product? A Study on Factors Affecting the Intention to Use Smartwatches. Computers in Human Behavior 63 (2016), 777 -- 786.
[11]
Stephanie Hui-Wen Chuah, Philipp A. Rauschnabel, Nina Krey, Bang Nguyen, Thurasamy Ramayah, and Shwetak Lade. 2016. Wearable Technologies: The Role of Usefulness and Visibility in Smartwatch Adoption. Computers in Human Behavior 65 (2016), 276 -- 284.
[12]
James Clawson, Jessica A. Pater, Andrew D. Miller, Elizabeth D. Mynatt, and Lena Mamykina. 2015. No Longer Wearing: Investigating the Abandonment of Personal Health-tracking Technologies on Craigslist. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 647--658.
[13]
Daniel A. Epstein, Monica Caraway, Chuck Johnston, An Ping, James Fogarty, and Sean A. Munson. 2016. Beyond Abandonment to Next Steps: Understanding and Designing for Life After Personal Informatics Tool Use. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1109--1113.
[14]
Daniel A. Epstein, Jennifer H. Kang, Laura R. Pina, James Fogarty, and Sean A. Munson. 2016. Reconsidering the Device in the Drawer: Lapses As a Design Opportunity in Personal Informatics. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 829--840.
[15]
Alexander W. Ernst and Claus-Peter H. Ernst. 2016. Success Comes to Those Who Are Successful: The Influence of Past Product Expectation Confirmation on Smartwatch Usage. Springer International Publishing, Cham. 49--58 pages.
[16]
Thomas Fritz, Elaine M. Huang, Gail C. Murphy, and Thomas Zimmermann. 2014. Persuasive Technology in the Real World: A Study of Long-term Use of Activity Sensing Devices for Fitness. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 487--496.
[17]
Rúben Gouveia, Evangelos Karapanos, and Marc Hassenzahl. 2015. How Do We Engage with Activity Trackers?: A Longitudinal Study of Habito. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1305--1316.
[18]
Haibo He and Edwardo A. Garcia. 2009. Learning from Imbalanced Data. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 21, 9 (Sept 2009), 1263--1284.
[19]
Yoonhyuk Jung, Seongcheol Kim, and Boreum Choi. 2016. Consumer Valuation of the Wearables: The Case of Smartwatches. Computers in Human Behavior 63 (2016), 899 -- 905.
[20]
Haik Kalantarian and Majid Sarrafzadeh. 2015. Audio-based Detection and Evaluation of Eating Behavior using the Smartwatch Platform. Computers in Biology and Medicine 65 (2015), 1 -- 9.
[21]
Jonathan J. Kandell. 1998. Internet Addiction on Campus: The Vulnerability of College Students. CyberPsychology 8 Behavior 1, 1 (1998).
[22]
Evangelos Karapanos, Rben Gouveia, Marc Hassenzahl, and Jodi Forlizzi. 2016. Wellbeing in the Making: Peoples’ Experiences with Wearable Activity Trackers. Psychology of Well-Being 6, 4 (2016).
[23]
Minsam Ko, Seungwoo Choi, Subin Yang, Joonwon Lee, and Uichin Lee. 2015. FamiLync: Facilitating Participatory Parental Mediation of Adolescents’ smartphone use. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing. ACM, 867--878.
[24]
Minsam Ko, Seungwoo Choi, Koji Yatani, and Uichin Lee. 2016. Lock n’LoL: Group-based Limiting Assistance App to Mitigate Smartphone Distractions in Group Activities. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 998--1010.
[25]
Minsam Ko, Subin Yang, Joonwon Lee, Christian Heizmann, Jinyoung Jeong, Uichin Lee, Daehee Shin, Koji Yatani, Junehwa Song, and Kyong-Mee Chung. 2015. NUGU: A Group-based Intervention App for Improving Self-regulation of Limiting Smartphone Use. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 8 Social Computing. ACM, 1235--1245.
[26]
Amanda Lazar, Christian Koehler, Joshua Tanenbaum, and David H. Nguyen. 2015. Why We Use and Abandon Smart Devices. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 635--646.
[27]
Uichin Lee, Joonwon Lee, Minsam Ko, Changhun Lee, Yuhwan Kim, Subin Yang, Koji Yatani, Gahgene Gweon, Kyong-Mee Chung, and Junehwa Song. 2014. Hooked on Smartphones: An Exploratory Study on Smartphone Overuse Among College Students. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2327--2336.
[28]
Ian Li, Anind Dey, and Jodi Forlizzi. 2010. A Stage-based Model of Personal Informatics Systems. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 557--566.
[29]
Ian Li, Anind K. Dey, and Jodi Forlizzi. 2011. Understanding My Data, Myself: Supporting Self-reflection with Ubicomp Technologies. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 405--414.
[30]
Hong Lu, Wei Pan, Nicholas D. Lane, Tanzeem Choudhury, and Andrew T. Campbell. 2009. SoundSense: Scalable Sound Sensing for People-centric Applications on Mobile Phones. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys ’09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 165--178.
[31]
Jay Lundell and Corrie Bates. 2016. Understanding User Experience Journeys for a Smart Watch Device. Springer International Publishing, Cham. 424--433 pages.
[32]
Kent Lyons. 2015. What Can a Dumb Watch Teach a Smartwatch?: Informing the Design of Smartwatches. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3--10.
[33]
Kent Lyons. 2016. Smartwatch Innovation: Exploring a Watch-First Model. IEEE Pervasive Computing 15, 1 (Jan 2016), 10--13.
[34]
Jochen Meyer, Jochen Schnauber, Wilko Heuten, Harm Wienbergen, Rainer Hambrecht, Hans-JRürgen Appelrath, and Susanne Boll. 2016. Exploring Longitudinal Use of Activity Trackers. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI). 198--206.
[35]
Jochen Meyer, Merlin Wasmann, Wilko Heuten, Abdallah El Ali, and Susanne C.J. Boll. 2017. Identification and Classification of Usage Patterns in Long-Term Activity Tracking. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 667--678.
[36]
Chulhong Min, Seungwoo Kang, Chungkuk Yoo, Jeehoon Cha, Sangwon Choi, Younghan Oh, and Junehwa Song. 2015. Exploring Current Practices for Battery Use and Management of Smartwatches. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11--18.
[37]
Vivian Genaro Motti and Kelly Caine. 2016. Smart Wearables or Dumb Wearables?: Understanding How Context Impacts the UX in Wrist Worn Interaction. In Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication (SIGDOC ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 10, 10 pages.
[38]
Ian Oakley, DoYoung Lee, MD. Rasel Islam, and Augusto Esteves. 2015. Beats: Tapping Gestures for Smart Watches. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1237--1246.
[39]
Jeungmin Oh and Uichin Lee. 2015. Exploring UX Issues in Quantified Self Technologies. In Eighth International Conference on Mobile Computing and Ubiquitous Networkin (ICMU ’15).
[40]
Chunjong Park, Junsung Lim, Juho Kim, Sung-Ju Lee, and Dongman Lee. 2017. “Don’t Bother Me. I’m Socializing!”: Breakpoint-Based Smartphone Notification System. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 8 Social Computing (CSCW ’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA.
[41]
Veljko Pejovic and Mirco Musolesi. 2014. InterruptMe: Designing Intelligent Prompting Mechanisms for Pervasive Applications. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 897--908.
[42]
Stefania Pizza, Barry Brown, Donald McMillan, and Airi Lampinen. 2016. Smartwatch in Vivo. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5456--5469.
[43]
Rachael Purta, Stephen Mattingly, Lixing Song, Omar Lizardo, David Hachen, Christian Poellabauer, and Aaron Striegel. 2016. Experiences Measuring Sleep and Physical Activity Patterns Across a Large College Cohort with Fitbits. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 28--35.
[44]
Reza Rawassizadeh, Blaine A. Price, and Marian Petre. 2014. Wearables: Has the Age of Smartwatches Finally Arrived? Commun. ACM 58, 1 (Dec. 2014), 45--47.
[45]
Sasank Reddy, Min Mun, Jeff Burke, Deborah Estrin, Mark Hansen, and Mani Srivastava. 2010. Using Mobile Phones to Determine Transportation Modes. ACM Trans. Sen. Netw. 6, 2, Article 13 (March 2010), 27 pages.
[46]
Jun Rekimoto and Hitomi Tsujita. 2014. Inconvenient Interactions: An Alternative Interaction Design Approach to Enrich Our Daily Activities. In Proceedings of the 2014 International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 225--228.
[47]
John Rooksby, Mattias Rost, Alistair Morrison, and Matthew Chalmers Chalmers. 2014. Personal Tracking As Lived Informatics. In Proceedings of the 32Nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1163--1172.
[48]
Steven Schirra and Frank R. Bentley. 2015. ”It’s Kind of Like an Extra Screen for My Phone”: Understanding Everyday Uses of Consumer Smart Watches. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2151--2156.
[49]
Patrick C. Shih, Kyungsik Han, Erika Shehan Poole, Mary Beth Rosson, and John M. Carroll. 2015. Why We Use and Abandon Smart Devices. In Proceedings of iConference.
[50]
Hitomi Tsujita and Jun Rekimoto. 2011. Smiling Makes Us Happier: Enhancing Positive Mood and Communication with Smile-encouraging Digital Appliances. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1--10.
[51]
Ulrike von Luxburg. 2007. A Tutorial on Spectral Clustering. Statistics and Computing 17, 4 (2007), 395--416.
[52]
Rui Wang, Fanglin Chen, Zhenyu Chen, Tianxing Li, Gabriella Harari, Stefanie Tignor, Xia Zhou, Dror Ben-Zeev, and Andrew T. Campbell. 2014. StudentLife: Assessing Mental Health, Academic Performance and Behavioral Trends of College Students Using Smartphones. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3--14.
[53]
Dominik Weber, Alexandra Voit, Philipp Kratzer, and Niels Henze. 2016. In-situ Investigation of Notifications in Multi-device Environments. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1259--1264.
[54]
Cheng Xu and Kent Lyons. 2015. Shimmering Smartwatches: Exploring the Smartwatch Design Space. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 69--76.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Participant‐Centered Engagement for Sustained Adherence to Smartwatches: A 12‐Month Prospective Decentralized Digital Health StudyClinical and Translational Science10.1111/cts.7015518:2Online publication date: 15-Feb-2025
  • (2024)Using Digital Health Technologies to Monitor Pain, Medication Adherence and Physical Activity in Young People with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis: A Feasibility StudyHealthcare10.3390/healthcare1203039212:3(392)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Understanding the Relationship between EMA Methods, Sensed Behavior, and Responsiveness: A Cross-Study Analysis (Preprint)JMIR mHealth and uHealth10.2196/57018Online publication date: 6-Feb-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies  Volume 1, Issue 3
September 2017
2023 pages
EISSN:2474-9567
DOI:10.1145/3139486
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 September 2017
Accepted: 01 July 2017
Revised: 01 May 2017
Received: 01 February 2017
Published in IMWUT Volume 1, Issue 3

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Activity Tracker
  2. Personal Informatics
  3. Smartwatch
  4. User Experience
  5. Wearable Device

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed

Funding Sources

  • NRF

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)338
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)31
Reflects downloads up to 03 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Participant‐Centered Engagement for Sustained Adherence to Smartwatches: A 12‐Month Prospective Decentralized Digital Health StudyClinical and Translational Science10.1111/cts.7015518:2Online publication date: 15-Feb-2025
  • (2024)Using Digital Health Technologies to Monitor Pain, Medication Adherence and Physical Activity in Young People with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis: A Feasibility StudyHealthcare10.3390/healthcare1203039212:3(392)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Understanding the Relationship between EMA Methods, Sensed Behavior, and Responsiveness: A Cross-Study Analysis (Preprint)JMIR mHealth and uHealth10.2196/57018Online publication date: 6-Feb-2024
  • (2024)“It tracks me!”: An analysis of apple watch nudging and user adoption mechanismsHealth Informatics Journal10.1177/1460458224129140530:4Online publication date: 14-Nov-2024
  • (2024)mmArrhythmiaProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36435498:1(1-25)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Reading Between the HeatProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36314417:4(1-30)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2024
  • (2024)On Stress: Combining Human Factors and Biosignals to Inform the Placement and Design of a Skin-like Stress SensorProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3643473(1-13)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Exploring Context-Aware Mental Health Self-Tracking Using Multimodal Smart Speakers in Home EnvironmentsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642846(1-18)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Wrist-bound Guanxi, Jiazu, and Kuolie: Unpacking Chinese Adolescent Smartwatch-Mediated SocializationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642044(1-21)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)A Portable Personalized Environmental Quality Monitoring System (PONG) Version 3IEEE Sensors Journal10.1109/JSEN.2024.340585824:14(22926-22933)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2024
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Full Access

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media