Predicting Subjective Well-Being by Smartphone Usage Behaviors

Subjective Well-Being (SWB) refers to how people experience the quality of their lives, thus to acquire people’s SWB levels timely and effectively is very important. Self-report and interviewing are mostly used techniques for assessing SWB, but cannot be done in time. This study aims to predict one’s SWB levels by smartphone usage behaviours. We collect users’ smartphone usage and self-reported subjective well-being, and found that several usage behaviours correlate with SWB, especially for females. For example, smartphone users with higher SWB scores tend to use more communicating apps, play more games and read more, but take fewer photos. Based on these findings, we trained a predicting model of user’s SWB based on smartphone usage behaviours, and the accuracy is up to 62%. The result indicates that SWB can be identified based on smartphone usage fairly well.