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Gambling, Gaming & Technology Use Community of Interest

The Gambling, Gaming & Technology Use Community of Interest brings together addiction and mental health service providers, researchers and subject matter experts in the fields of gambling, technology/Internet use and video gaming to collaborate and share knowledge on emerging trends and clinical best practices.

This newly released CBC News article discusses new Smartphone management tools that enable users to get daily and weekly activity reports about the total time they spend in each app, their usage and notifications as well as the ability for parents to put controls on usage.

Featured in the article, @Registered Member points out that this may be one avenue to help reduce or minimize Smartphone use but that there are also other options such as turning off notifications and scheduling tech-free time.

What are your thoughts on the effectiveness of these management tools?

Last edited by Registered Member
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Thanks for sharing this article, Tiffany. I think tracking and monitoring usage is a good first step to increasing self awareness around the possibility of over-usage and can allow people to start questioning whether their level of use is causing problems at all. There are also other apps (e.g., Rescue Time, Cold Turkey, Self Control, etc.) that help capture this info and/or allow users to block certain websites to help minimize use.

Thanks for sharing, Matt! Just to add to this discussion - an article published yesterday in TechCrunch announces that Facebook and Instragram's new "digital well-being screen-time management dashboards" have been launched in the US. This dashboard shows how many minutes people use each of these apps per day and their average use in a week. It also allows users to mute notifications and set daily usage limits, after which a notification will come up to say they have surpassed the limit.

What do others think about these features? Will they help people to start thinking about changing their technology use behaviours?

Note: This article also briefly mentions Screen Time on iOS 12 and Digital Wellbeing on Android that can also assist with usage tracking on devices.

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