The Human Screenome Project set to recording everything everyone does on their smartphones

Three professors from Harvard University announced that they will be undertaking an extensive new study about the way us humans interact with our smartphones. Professors call this new study as The Human Screenome Project; the name which has been taken from the famed Human Genome Study, which was a 13-year long study of international level which successfully helped to map the DNA of human beings.

The proposal for the Human Screenome Project is aiming to find the granular measure of the human usage of smartphones in the same manner as the Genome Study. As per researchers, the data they will be collecting will be rapid and constant screenshots that will be taken from smartphones in real-time and are called Screenomes. This data will be the primary data source for the data analysis and for the upcoming in-depth research smartphones have on society. The idea behind the Human Screenome Project is to look for the information as to how the ordinary human smartphone usage looks like in a more meaningful way instead of the current measures.

Researchers have so far been using Screetime as the basis for collecting the data as to how long do the subjects spend time on their smartphones or its various social media apps. This data will be a standard measure for the interrogation of the effects caused by social media on the overall society and human psychology.

With the Screenome technique, every time a subject of the study activates their phone, the background programming is going to take a screenshot every 5 seconds time until the subject ends his session on the app. Stanford researchers claim that when all of those individual screenshots are analyzed, they will be able to provide for a full picture of the human digital lives.

So far, in order to illustrate the screenomic measurements, 2 14 years old kids were evaluated. Each of them had similar statistics with a few hours of the day spent on their smartphones with things like checking the phone first thing after waking up and the last thing before going to sleep.

Taking the screenshots for every 5 seconds of using the smartphones as per this study seems to be a pretty daunting thing but researchers also assure that the study will be air-tight when it comes to the privacy of the subjects. Still, it is easier said than done.

A lot of backlashes have been seen after the news broke about this study with many people reacting to the news in a single word “NOPE”.