Earlier this year I highlighted a number of the ever increasing array of tasks your smartphone can do for you, including alerting us when we’re feeling drowsy at the wheel, tracking our alcohol intake and even providing pregnancy testing.

Detecting boredom

Another application to add to the list has recently been developed by a team of Spanish researchers who believe that the smartphone is quite capable of detecting when we’re bored.

The study uses our usual mobile activity, such as our call history, the time of day and our usage intensity to gauge our excitement levels. They claim that their method is capable of detecting boredom with an accuracy of around 83 percent.

Smart machines

Central to many of the new smartphone applications is their apparent ability to infer our state of mind from various activities and data. Whilst there are undoubtedly inherent challenges in doing this accurately, the potency should it be achieved is evident.

The Spanish team went about their task by first getting an understanding of just what boredom was. They surveyed participants at various times of the day to assess their boredom levels. These responses were then compared with data collected from their phones, including app usage, calls/texts made and so on. In simple terms, the more bored someone was, the more they used their phone.

This hypothesis was then tested via a custom built app that aimed to decide on its own whether the user was bored or not. When the boredom alert was triggered, the app would send the user a link to something ‘interesting’, such as a BuzzFeed article.

A fresh set of users then tried the app out for a couple of weeks, and it emerged that those who had indeed been identified as being bored were much more likely to click through to read the article than their peers who were sent the link at random times.

The next step is to learn more about the kind of content people want to consume when they’re bored, and indeed whether it might be suitable to include something more meaningful than mind candy.

Of course, the research is far from conclusive proof, as it was based upon self-reported boredom levels, which may not be the most accurate reflection of our mental state. There will undoubtedly be more work done in this area, providing of course they can recruit enough of us that are willing to share our data.

Whilst there are obviously commercial benefits deriving from this understanding, the team hope it can also have some altruistic gains too. For instance, it might lead to a greater understanding of depression, and give us the ability to better predict its onset.

“We know boredom leads to depression, so if you can infer the person is bored, you can do something about it,” they conclude.