How your smartphone can tell if you're bored

Add "boredom detector" to the seemingly endless list of things your smartphone can do. A group of researchers say they've developed an algorithm that can suss this out by looking at your mobile activity, considering factors like the time since you last had a call or text, the time of day, and how intensely you're using the phone

The work, which was conducted by several researchers at Telefonica Research in Barcelona, Spain, will be presented at the UbiComp ubiquitous computing conference in Japan next week. The researchers found that looking at this kind of data gave a reliable prediction of boredom as often as 83% of the time. The researchers also went a step further by sending bored smartphone users an alert to check out an article on BuzzFeed — which people who were judged to be bored clicked on more often than people who weren't Read more...