Time2Stop: Adaptive and Explainable Human-AI Loop for Smartphone Overuse Intervention

Despite a rich history of investigating smartphone overuse intervention techniques, AI-based just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITAI) methods for overuse reduction are lacking. We develop Time2Stop, an intelligent, adaptive, and explainable JITAI system that leverages machine learning to identify optimal intervention timings, introduces interventions with transparent AI explanations, and collects user feedback to establish a human-AI loop and adapt the intervention model over time. We conducted an 8-week field experiment (N=71) to evaluate the effectiveness of both the adaptation and explanation aspects of Time2Stop. Our results indicate that our adaptive models significantly outperform the baseline methods on intervention accuracy (>32.8% relatively) and receptivity (>8.0%). In addition, incorporating explanations further enhances the effectiveness by 53.8% and 11.4% on accuracy and receptivity, respectively. Moreover, Time2Stop significantly reduces overuse, decreasing app visit frequency by 7.0~8.9%. Our subjective data also echoed these quantitative measures. Participants preferred the adaptive interventions and rated the system highly on intervention time accuracy, effectiveness, and level of trust. We envision our work can inspire future research on JITAI systems with a human-AI loop to evolve with users.