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Prototyping Digital Device use Data that allow workers to monitor and reflect their use of digital devices

Researchers Involved

Dr. Malte Doehne

Dr. André Meyer

Prof. Dr. Thomas Fritz

research areas

(job) crafting
culture
digital platforms
employee health and wellbeing
future of work
meaning

timeframe

2024 - present

contact

doehne@soziologie.uzh.ch
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Prototyping Digital Device use Data that allow workers to monitor and reflect their use of digital devices Project Image
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Digital Device use Data

This seedfunding project has produced a ready-to-use, extensible self-monitoring software that captures participants’ digital device use data and self-reports.

It has become a DSI infrastructure that can be used by other researchers.
See: D2USP

Background

Background

Smartphones, laptops, and computers have an increasingly important part in our personal and professional lives, impacting how most of us work, communicate, and entertain our- selves.

Despite the magnitude of these ongoing changes, remarkably little is known about how individuals actually spend time on their digital devices in general and on work-related tasks in particular. While much research has considered social media engagement and the effects of screen time on mental health, work-related device use, particularly of laptops and computers, remains understudied. This leaves a conspicuous gap in our understanding of work-related digital device use.

In part, the difficulty of studying digital device use stems from the potentially sensitive nature of such data for assessments of worker productivity, potentially hindering participant recruitment for research. Additionally, the lack of universally accepted protocols for tracking device use across applications and operating systems poses a challenge. To address both these issues simultaneously, we are developing the Digital Device Activity Monitoring lab (D2AM), a regulation-compliant infrastructure that is to be hosted and maintained by an independent data steward, the UZH.

Goals

Goals

At its core, this infrastructure comprises an in-house-developed activity tracking software that emphasizes user privacy by storing all collected data locally on the user’s device. This software serves two interrelated purposes. On the one hand, it enables users to self-monitor and reflect on various aspects of their digital device use (e.g., perceived productivity, time well spent, well-being). On the other hand, it enables users to donate an anonymized version of their device usage data for scientific research.
Thus, our goal is to facilitate individuals’ conscious usage of digital devices and to strengthen citizens’ data sovereignty. At the same time, we aim to establish an objective micro-foundation for research into the ongoing digitalization of work. While our long-term goal is to develop a modularly extensible, open platform for research into digital device use, our initial focus (and the scope of this seed-funding proposal) is on a prototype study of device use patterns among students in higher education. The project is in the interest of our community as a whole and we are in discussion with further members of our community about their interest in participating. The current implementation is organized as an interfaculty collaboration of the above mentioned DSI Work community members from PhF and WWF.
Method

Method

We are applying for seed funding to cover the salary of a student programmer who will be tasked with updating and adapting the existing and functional activity-tracking software, PersonalAnalytics, to the requirements of the D2AM lab. This student programmer will assist André Meyer, the main developer of the software, with improving and extending elements of the data anonymization process and with porting the software from Windows to MacOS.