Design and Development of a Mobile Application to Combat Digital Addiction and Dissociative States During Phone Usage

Design features such as “infinite scrolling” and the state which keeps users engaged in this behaviour can be described as a timelessness or dissociative state and has links to the onset of digital addiction. As addiction/dissociation and the effect of these design choices could therefore occur automatically for the user, an active prevention technique is needed to combat this behaviour. In this paper, we present analysis, design and development of a proof-of-concept solution for the interruption of dissociative of users. A mobile application has been designed and developed for an android device which incorporates the prior research and provides features relevant to the prevention of the problem area. The prototype allows to set up interruption time period and to select the applications to interrupt users on a session-based usage viewpoint. An evaluation has been made through useful and constructive feedback received from user testing. Through evaluation of the prototype solution, the application has potential use not only as a product for the general user, but as a tool for research into other methods of digital dissociative state interruptions.