Skip to content

Phone Screen

Sensor parameters description for [PHONE_SCREEN]:

Key                              Description
[CONTAINER] Data stream container (database table, CSV file, etc.) where the screen data is stored

RAPIDS provider

Available time segments and platforms

  • Available for all time segments
  • Available for Android and iOS

File Sequence

- data/raw/{pid}/phone_screen_raw.csv
- data/raw/{pid}/phone_screen_with_datetime.csv
- data/interim/{pid}/phone_screen_episodes.csv
- data/interim/{pid}/phone_screen_episodes_resampled.csv
- data/interim/{pid}/phone_screen_episodes_resampled_with_datetime.csv
- data/interim/{pid}/phone_screen_features/phone_screen_{language}_{provider_key}.csv
- data/processed/features/{pid}/phone_screen.csv

Parameters description for [PHONE_SCREEN][PROVIDERS][RAPIDS]:

Key                                                           Description
[COMPUTE] Set to True to extract PHONE_SCREEN features from the RAPIDS provider
[FEATURES] Features to be computed, see table below
[REFERENCE_HOUR_FIRST_USE] The reference point from which firstuseafter is to be computed, default is midnight
[IGNORE_EPISODES_SHORTER_THAN] Ignore episodes that are shorter than this threshold (minutes). Set to 0 to disable this filter.
[IGNORE_EPISODES_LONGER_THAN] Ignore episodes that are longer than this threshold (minutes), default is 6 hours. Set to 0 to disable this filter.
[EPISODE_TYPES] Currently we only support unlock episodes (from when the phone is unlocked until the screen is off)

Features description for [PHONE_SCREEN][PROVIDERS][RAPIDS]:

Feature Units Description
sumduration minutes Total duration of all unlock episodes.
maxduration minutes Longest duration of any unlock episode.
minduration minutes Shortest duration of any unlock episode.
avgduration minutes Average duration of all unlock episodes.
stdduration minutes Standard deviation duration of all unlock episodes.
countepisode episodes Number of all unlock episodes
firstuseafter minutes Minutes until the first unlock episode.

Assumptions/Observations

  1. In Android, lock events can happen right after an off event, after a few seconds of an off event, or never happen depending on the phone's settings, therefore, an unlock episode is defined as the time between an unlock and a off event. In iOS, on and off events do not exist, so an unlock episode is defined as the time between an unlock and a lock event.

  2. Events in iOS are recorded reliably albeit some duplicated lock events within milliseconds from each other, so we only keep consecutive unlock/lock pairs. In Android you cand find multiple consecutive unlock or lock events, so we only keep consecutive unlock/off pairs. In our experiments these cases are less than 10% of the screen events collected and this happens because ACTION_SCREEN_OFF and ACTION_SCREEN_ON are sent when the device becomes non-interactive which may have nothing to do with the screen turning off. In addition to unlock/off episodes, in Android it is possible to measure the time spent on the lock screen before an unlock event as well as the total screen time (i.e. ON to OFF) but these are not implemented at the moment.

  3. We transform iOS screen events to match Android’s format, we replace lock episodes with off episodes (2 with 0) in iOS. However, as mentioned above this is still computing unlock to lock episodes.