Researchers are using Google’s app to study the effect of phones on mental health

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The University of Oregon is using the Health Studies app to study the effects of phones on mental health. The goal of the study is to find out how people use their phones and how that affects their well-being. The aim of the research is to help companies design better products and even shape policy in the future, according to a post on the company's website.

According to the post, researchers are using the app because it can help them get a better picture of how people actually use their phones, as opposed to other studies when people are asked to track and report their own usage of apps. Researchers hope that this approach will allow them to find relationships that other studies have missed, such as how the amount of time you spend looking at a screen affects your sleep. Reducing the amount of work participants have to do will allow them to attract a larger group of people. They could get data from underserved and younger populations by getting a bigger sample size.

The researchers say they will collect direct, objective measures of how people use their phones. According to Iz Conroy, the system uses some of the same data as the built-in Digital Wellbeing system, but it doesn't track how you use your phone.

Users will have to give informed consent to participate and the data will only be used for research and to inform better products, according to the post.

The Health Studies app was launched in December of 2020. People can use the app to sign up for studies, where it will collect their data and aggregate it so researchers can see trends for demographics but not an individual's personal info. You can sign up to participate in the digital well-being study if you download the app from the Play Store. For four weeks, the study will track your phone usage.