Visualizing College Students' Geo-Temporal Context-Varying Significant Phone Call Patterns

Sayanton V. Dibbo, Yugyeong Kim, Sudip Vhaduri, Christian Poellabauer

Abstract: Students often face enormous changes and challenges in life when starting college education, such as meeting new people, more responsibilities in life, and being away from family and their comfort zones. These sudden changes often lead to an elevation of stress and anxiety, affecting a student’s mental health, well-being, and academic progress. This situation can even get worse with the outbreak of a pandemic, such as COVID-19, due to lockdown and associated disruption of the academic calendar. In this work, we use different visualizations and statistical techniques to find various geographical places and temporal factors that affect students’ phone call patterns (in terms of call duration and call frequency) to promote the design and delivery of future smartphone-based health interventions to help students coping with sudden changes in lifestyles. From our detailed analysis of an 18-month longitudinal study dataset collected from a cohort of 464 freshmen, we obtain insights on phone call pattern variations during different temporal contexts, e.g., epochs of a day, days of a week, and in various geographical contexts (i.e., places of interest).