Understanding and Enhancing Digital Wellbeing Dimensions: Empirical Studies on Smartphone Usage Patterns and Recommendations of Micro-Informative Content

Digital technology has become an integral part of our lives, offering various benefits from communication and entertainment to education and productivity. However, its pervasive use has also raised concerns about its potential negative impact on users' wellbeing. This growing concern regarding the negative effects of technology overuse has led to the emergence of a new concept called "digital wellbeing." This thesis aims to contribute to the understanding of digital wellbeing of students and explores avenues for its enhancement, focusing on two primary goals: investigating the impact of smartphone usage on digital wellbeing, and developing strategies to enhance the digital wellbeing of users online.

Our investigation commenced with a systematic literature review focused on the adverse effects of smartphone utilization on students' digital wellbeing. Through this review, we summarized previous findings and identified limitations of previous studies. Additionally, we established a definition for digital wellbeing by synthesizing and integrating various descriptions found in the literature. We also reviewed interventions aimed at enhancing digital wellbeing and examined their limitation and the gaps in the literature. Following this, we conducted an empirical experiment to understand the relationship between students' smartphone use and digital wellbeing. This involved collecting objective data through smartphone usage logging and subjective data via experience sampling and questionnaires. Our findings highlighted that it is not solely the quantity of time spent that influences digital wellbeing but also the way, timing, and motivation behind the usage of smartphones. The insights gathered also emphasized the importance of designing personalized interventions to improve and support the digital wellbeing of users.

Progressing to our second objective, we designed and tested a deep reinforcement learning recommendation system that aims to transform passive scrolling and unproductive time online time into meaningful, enriching encounters. This system pushes for a balance between long and short-term rewards, recommending a mix of micro-informative and other content. Tested within a prototype video streaming platform, our system proved that such content can improve user satisfaction and encourage informal learning.

As our immersion in the digital environment deepens and its influence on our lives intensifies, fostering a healthier relationship with our devices becomes crucial. This thesis brings the concept of digital wellbeing for students into focus, moving beyond the usual focus on screen time to emphasize the importance of why and how we use our phones. Our research reviewed past studies, defined digital wellbeing, analyzed students' smartphone usage and digital wellbeing, and proposed the recommendation for micro-informative content online to make time spent online more enriching.