Summary
Abstract
Public media and researchers in different areas have recently focused on perhaps unexpected problems that derive from an excessive and frequent use of technology, giving rise to a new kind of psychological “digital” wellbeing. Such a novel and pressing topic has fostered, both in the academia and in the industry, the emergence of a variety of digital self-control tools allowing users to self-regulate their technology use through interventions like timers and lock-out mechanisms. While these emerging technologies for behavior change hold great promise to support people’s digital wellbeing, we still have a limited understanding of their real effectiveness, as well as of how to best design and evaluate them. Aiming to guide future research in this important domain, this article presents a systematic review and a meta-analysis of current work on tools for digital self-control. We surface motivations, strategies, design choices, and challenges that characterize the design, development, and evaluation of digital self-control tools. Furthermore, we estimate their overall effect size on reducing (unwanted) technology use through a meta-analysis. By discussing our findings, we provide insights on how to (i) overcome a limited perspective that exclusively focuses on technology overuse and self-monitoring tools, (ii) evaluate digital self-control tools through long-term studies and standardized measures, and (iii) bring ethics in the digital wellbeing discourse and deal with the business model of contemporary tech companies.
Journal
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
Altmetric Attention Score
Cite This Paper
Bibliography
The following papers were cited within this study.
The following papers were conducted after this paper's publication, and reference this exact study. They can be thought of as 'ensuing from' or 'being derived from' this study.
The following papers are recommended by Semantic Scholar.