The third day at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts for me with a session on digital trace data, and a paper by Kyle van Gaeveren, whose interest is in digital trace data. He notes that digital log data have always been very smartphone-dependent, and comparisons of this with laptop-derived trace data are important.
His project provided laptops to some 100 knowledge workers, and used a tool called ActivityWatch to trace which laptop and smartphone apps people were using; this tracked duration, frequency, and fragmentation, but also switching between devices and user mood. Part of the question here is how multi-device use changes screen time patterns.
It turned out that screen time roughly doubled; this was most pronounced for knowledge workers on workdays. But such patterns varied widely between participants, and activities like email, social media use, chat, and other social functions were surprisingly divided between laptops and smartphones.
Device and context switching was frequent during the day, with overlaps also common; device switching might be a sign of multitasking across devices. Patterns in user mood were somewhat linked to such device use patterns.
All of this means that single-device activity tracking studies may be at a risk of limited validity if participants are likely to work across multiple devices as a matter of course.
