A group of researchers have developed an algorithm to detect when a person is bored by analyzing their smartphone activity. The study was able to predict lack of interest with an impressive accuracy of up to 83%.
The investigation was conducted by Telefonica Research at Barcelona, Spain. They considered several factors such as the time, the degree of phone usage, and how long it had been since a person received a call or message. The team started the first phase of their study by developing the Borapp Android application to figure out the signs of boredom in an individual at a given time.
The app asked its 54 participants to indicate their level of boredom at different times during the course of a day. The survey was held for a period of two weeks. The responses that were received by the tool were weighed against data from the overall consumption of the phone, like how intensely the device was accessed and the number of apps used.
The researchers found that both activities increased as an individual got more bored. They developed their algorithm based on the information gleaned from the first phase. To determine its accuracy, the Telefonica team built another app, the Borapp2, for a separate set of 16 people. This time round, the tool could figure out if a person was jaded, on its own.
If it detected signs of listlessness, the application would send out a notification asking the participant if they wanted to read a BuzzFeed article. While 20% of the people who were recognized as bored were prone to click on the alert, only 8% accessed it when they were randomly sent the question.
The findings of the study are set to be presented in Japan at the UbiComp ubiquitous computing conference. The paper suggests smartphones can abate boredom in various ways such as presenting relevant content to catch a user’s interest or productive activities like clearing a To-Do list.