Diversity and End User Context in Smartphone Usage Sessions

Julkaisun kokoteksti on luettavissa vain Aalto-tunnuksilla.Please note that access to the fulltext is limited to Aalto staff and students.Mobile end user context has gained increasingattention in the mobile services industry. Context information isseen as an important component in developing new, morepersonalized, mobile services and applications. This paper studiesthe effect of end user context on smartphone usage sessions.Smartphone usage sessions are used to depict user behavior andusage habits of smartphone users on a high level. We havedetected end user contexts, and extracted smartphone usagesession information from handset-based data of 140 smartphoneusers. We first examine and describe usage sessions as such, andthen in different end user contexts. According to our usagesession analysis, smartphone usage is highly diversified acrossusers. For example, the average number of sessions per dayranges from 3 to 46. Characteristics of smartphone usage sessionsdiffer in different end user contexts. For example, an averagesession is 37 % longer in the Home-context than in the Office-context,but Office has 56 % more sessions per time unit thanHome. The results imply that mobile services and applicationsneed to adapt to user behavior in order to be personalizedenough, and that context awareness is indeed a worthwhile steptowards this.Peer reviewe