Abstract
This study investigates how various smartphone applications are used, and how that use leads to changes in various aspects of urban life. Different types of applications and the scope of their impacts on urban life are captured based on a life-oriented approach. Data were collected via an online survey of 1000 residents living in different cities of Japan in December 2017. It was found that 75.1% of respondents owned a smartphone and used 3.5 applications on average. Among the users of smartphone application(s), 45.4% experienced at least one life change. Applying a random forest approach, this study examined the relative influence of application usage on urban life as compared to built-environment, individual, and household attributes, as well as interdependencies across life changes, by building 37 forests with 37000 trees. It was revealed that applications of “game”, “photo, video”, “utility, tool, efficiency”, “shopping”, “healthcare, sports, beauty”, “touring”, “education”, “book, comic”, and “navigation, and map” induce changes in work, study, daily trip making, talks between family members, time use, sleeping, expenditure, physical exercise, and shopping in a complicated manner, even though the built environment attributes are the most important predictors to the life changes as a whole.
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