Investigating Low-Battery Anxiety of Mobile Users

Yu Zhang, Guoming Tang, Qianyi Huang, Kui Wu, Yangjing Wu, Yi Wang

Abstract: With the continuous upgrading of mobile networks and highly popularization of mobile services, cellphones have taken an indispensable role in people’s daily life. The intensive usage of cellphones usually leads to heavy dependence on the devices, and further triggers the pervasive low-battery anxiety (LBA) among mobile users. Although having been found that nearly 90% people more or less suffered from LBA, we are still not clear about the characteristics of those who are more prone to it and how to help them alleviate it. In this work, to better understand LBA susceptible populations, we conduct a questionnaire investigation over 2000+ mobile users, look into their feelings and reactions regarding LBA, and quantify their anxiety degree during the draining of battery power. Based on the numerical anxiety degree, we further divide the participated mobile users into four groups as per LBA severity and perform user profiling to learn the specific characteristics of each group. For the first time, this work reveals the potential characteristics of specific user groups with different LBA severeness and provides important references on alleviating LBA suffering. New angles on exploiting our findings for other mobile services/applications are also discussed.