Researchers at DA-IICT reveal that smartphones do not influence student’s CPI

DA-IICT Blog
Nov 5 · 6 min read

Kanupriya Dasgupta writes about the research done by Prof Alka Parikh, Prof Kalyan Sasidhar and PhD student Maitri Vaghela where they have found that a student spends an average 7 hours a day staring at their phones. That data comes from a specially designed app which was developed by the B.Tech student of DA-IICT. The study reveals that the usage of phones does not affect their academic performance.

Professor Kalyan Sasidhar and Professor Alka Parikh

The smartphone is now a babysitter — pacifying bawling babies with musical cartoons or nursery rhymes. By the time these infants will grow up, they will be as much addicted to the screen as the generation preceding them. As of now, mobile phones have virtually taken over the lives of people spending a good seven hours with the device. And then there are those whose engagement can stretch beyond that duration, signifying a deepening of addiction. But, the usage and attitude towards smartphone may vary from people to people. Smartphones often serve as a go-to source for staying informed about breaking news and community happenings, getting from place to place, conducting transactions, and navigating life events such as finding a new job or getting information about a health condition or browsing through educational content.

Researchers at DA-IICT have found that a student spends an average of 7 hours a day staring at their mobile screens, but the study does not prove a negative picture or an “addiction’ in general. When students were asked how they feel about their phones, smartphone owners paint a generally positive picture — connecting rather than distracting, helpful rather than frustrating, and ultimately worth the cost of ownership. Like every coin has two sides, the fact that few youngsters are fanatical about being always available and are extremely uneasy if unable to contact their friend’s countless times each day or use social media.

The study was conducted by Prof Alka Parikh, Prof Kalyan Sasidhar and PhD student Maitri Vaghela to examine whether excessive smartphone usage impacts student life and academic performances. The research was conducted with the support of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), M.Tech and B.Tech students of DA-IICT. The data comes from a specially developed data mining mobile application which was developed by the B.Tech student, Sai Anish and each of the 50 students was asked to download the app onto their mobiles.

Prof Kalyan Sasidhar while talking to the Media officer about the research methodology said, “The existing literature concentrates mainly on the level of addiction and data collection from questionnaire surveys. The answers to these questionnaires are often inaccurate and biased. To overcome this our students of B.Tech developed a mobile app and we surveyed 50 students who installed the mobile application and for 1.5 months, data were collected every five minutes. This is one of the few studies where we directly got the data from the user’s device about parameters such as usage time, applications used, sleeping time, activity time and so on.”

The findings suggest that while students reported 4–5 hours of mobile use through conventional questionnaire surveys on our app reveals that some students spend as high as 15 hours a day on mobiles. On an average student spend 6.87 hours on a mobile phone.

As per McKinsey’s latest report on Indian online trends, there are an estimated 560 million internet subscribers in India as of September 2018. And that number’s expected to increase significantly by 2025. , Indians are spending the highest amount of time on social media in the world. And it’s bordering on addiction almost.

Indians spend more time on social media than online users in China or the US — we spend about 17 hours per week on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others.

Prof Alka Parikh said, “Smartphones have also turned children into couch potatoes because they rarely show up on the playground. This, in turn, has become a contributing factor in rising obesity among children. They are also prone to suffer from eye problems due to prolonged exposure to the screen. The data revealed that only 10 per cent of the student exercised in 1.5 months. Besides that, data also revealed that 80 per cent of the students slept for less than 6 hours at night. However, the majority of the students told us that they did not feel sleepy during the day time and the reported that they had good sleep irrespective of sleeping for less than 6 hours. The reason might be that they slept during the day time after lectures at the institute.”

Researchers found a very weak correlation between the hours spent on smartphones every day and the students’ cumulative performances index (CPI) for the semester during which the study was conducted. There was not a very vast difference between grades of students spending over 10 hours and less than 4 hours on the phone. This shows that access to the Internet can improve the quality of education in many ways. It opens doorways to a wealth of information, knowledge and educational resources, increasing opportunities for learning in and beyond the classroom.

Data mining was done by two M.Tech students, Dimple Shah and Aswini Upasini, to learn how long their subjects spend on the phone.

About Professor Alka Parikh- Alka Parikh is a gold medalist in MA (Economics) from Mumbai University and holds PhD degree from Department of Agriculture and Allied Economics, Cornell University, USA. She has worked in TISS, Mumbai, Mumbai School of Economics and Public Policy and at present is a Professor at DA-IICT and teaches Principles of Economics and Policy Analysis and coordinator for Rural Internships. Her research addresses various aspects of economic development, including agriculture, poverty, employment, food and water security. She also gives her time to NGOs like Utthan (Ahmedabad) and Uplift (Pune) to further her commitment to the field.

About Professor Kalyan Sasidhar- Kalyan Sasidhar specialises in Mobile and Pervasive Computing which include Wireless Sensor Networks, Mobile Phone-Based Sensing. Previously he was an assistant professor in the Wireless Networks and Applications group at Amrita Vishwa Vidhyapeetham (Amrita University, Kerala). He was a postdoctoral researcher at Nanyang Technological University after completing his PhD in Computer Science from the University of North Texas in 2011. He has 25 plus publications in top journals and international conferences with citations of over 650 and hIndex of 11. Currently, he teaches Computer Networks, Distributed System and Pervasive Sensing Systems at DA-IICT.

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This is the official blog of Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT) Gandhinagar. It covers stories from the Institute.

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