Are our mobile phones driving us apart? Divert attention from mobile phones back to physical conversation!

Recent years have witnessed the proliferation of mobile technologies designed to enrich our lives by increasing our productivity, keeping us abreast of news, tracking our fitness, and connecting us to people right across the world. Despite these advantages, excessive mobile phone usage - especially during face-to-face social interactions - has been reported to cause significant negative social impact. In this paper, we lay the groundwork for a study investigating the motivations and patterns of phone usage in social situations, and developing intervention mechanism to direct users' attention away from their phones and towards their physical social space. We have conducted a small user study as a proof of concept and, although we cannot draw any inferences about the general population at this early stage, our findings do provide some indication of key reasons behind the phone usage and different usage patterns across the study participants. The concept of proactively interrupting users to discourage mobile phone use during social situations has been favourably received by our participants, and warrants further development into a more sophisticated form before conducting a larger scale study.