In 2020, more than 6.1 billion people will regularly use a mobile phone, according to a study published by Ericsson in 2015. In fact, these devices are already the machines that a large part of the population uses the most in their day-to-day lives . That is what a team of researchers from different universities in the United Kingdom maintain in a recent essay published in the journal PLOS ONE , in which they claim that most of us do not take our eyes off our smartphones, literally.
The psychologist Sally Andrews, from Nottingham Trent University School of Social Sciences, who coordinated the work, and her collaborators have shown that we use our phones for an average of five hours a day . In that time – roughly a third of all we spend awake – we consulted them about 85 times . As they indicate, these are fast interactions, a phenomenon that is becoming more and more frequent among users.
To determine this, they installed an app on the mobile phones of 23 volunteers, between 18 and 33 years old, which monitored their use of their terminal for two weeks, from the number of calls they made and the number of messages they sent through different messaging services even if they turned on the music player. More than half of the time, their mobile use did not exceed 30 seconds .
According to these experts, frequent use of the phone does not have to be a problem . Furthermore, they warn that the data they provide in their study must be interpreted with caution.
