Understanding College Students' Phone Call Behaviors Towards a Sustainable Mobile Health and Wellbeing Solution
It addresses stress and wellbeing challenges for college students, but is incremental as it applies existing monitoring methods to a specific context.
This study analyzed college students' phone call behaviors across different locations and times to understand how communication patterns relate to stress and wellbeing during the transition to college life, using visualization techniques to identify variations in call duration and frequency.
During the transition from high school to on-campus college life, a student leaves home and starts facing enormous life changes, including meeting new people, more responsibilities, being away from family, and academic challenges. These recent changes lead to an elevation of stress and anxiety, affecting a student's health and wellbeing. With the help of smartphones and their rich collection of sensors, we can continuously monitor various factors that affect students' behavioral patterns, such as communication behaviors associated with their health, wellbeing, and academic success. In this work, we try to assess college students' communication patterns (in terms of phone call duration and frequency) that vary across various geographical contexts (e.g., dormitories, classes, dining) during different times (e.g., epochs of a day, days of a week) using visualization techniques. Findings from this work will help foster the design and delivery of smartphone-based health interventions; thereby, help the students adapt to the changes in life.