Research & Evidence
Why De-Viced focuses first on building control rather than cutting screen time
Why mainstream screen-time advice often isn’t effective
The situation we’re talking about is a familiar one:
Someone tries to cut down their screen time. They use limits, app blockers, or other screen-time tools. It works for a while - but then the old patterns start creeping back.
We are not saying these tools never work. A 15 minute limit on Instagram does genuinely work for some people. But for others, the habit is more deeply rooted.
In this situation, reducing screen time alone does not reliably lead to lasting control over phone habits.
The studies below indicate:
It's not about
screen time
Statistically, the amount of time someone spends on their phone has only a small relationship with whether their phone use is problematic.
Benefits are temporary
Interventions focused exclusively on reducing screen time often produce temporary benefits, without leading to sustained improvements in problematic smartphone use.
Results don't Last
Screen-time management tools are frequently bypassed, difficult to maintain, and often followed by rapid returns to previous smartphone use patterns.
What the evidence points toward instead
If cutting screen time alone is too narrow, the next question is: what should we focus on instead?
The more promising direction comes from phone-use and broader behavior-change studies that look beyond restriction, and combine different skills that help people stay in control.
The studies below indicate:
Solo tactics don't work well
Individual strategies can sometimes provide benefits, but their effects are often limited or insufficient when used in isolation
Combinations work better
Interventions combining complementary techniques tend to produce stronger and more sustainable effects than those relying on a single mechanism alone.
How to understand the
De-Viced results
De-Viced has so far been tested in a pilot study of 44 participants following the eight- week guided behavior-change program (9 participants followed a shorter six-week protocol). Results are preliminary and have not yet been peer-reviewed. We are preparing the findings for submission for publication.
The main outcome we track is Problematic Smartphone Use (PSU).
What is Problematic Smartphone Use?
There is no agreed clinical definition of “phone addiction”. Instead, researchers use Problematic Smartphone Use to describe difficulties controlling phone use and the extent to which it interferes with everyday life. PSU is measured as a score rather than as time spent on the phone. For the De-Viced study, we used the validated 23-item Modified Problematic Use of Mobile Phones (MPUMP) questionnaire.
We chose PSU rather than screen time as our primary measure because the amount of time someone spends on their phone has only a weak relationship with whether their phone use is problematic. Someone can spend a lot of time on their phone intentionally, while someone else can spend less time but still feel that their use is difficult to control.
What did the pilot find?
Problematic smartphone use fell by 42% by the end of the program. More importantly, that improvement continued after the program ended. At the latest follow-up, six to twelve weeks after completion, PSU was 52% below baseline on average.
Participants also reported a substantial improvement in how satisfied they felt with their level of control over their phone use, increasing from an average of 1.9/5 before the program to 3.9/5 at the latest check-in.
De-Viced also tracks a set of self-regulation and resilience skills, including the ability to notice automatic use, manage urges and recover when things do not go to plan. These skills improved by 74% at program completion and remained 48% above baseline at the latest follow-up.
How does that compare with other interventions?
Several published studies of screen-time management and restriction-based interventions have reported reductions in problematic smartphone use of around 6–31%. For example, in a study where participants reduced screen time from around five hours to two hours a day for three weeks, PSU fell by 31%, but the improvement had reduced to 18% six weeks later.
These are useful reference points, but they are not head-to-head comparisons. The studies use different interventions, participant groups, study lengths and PSU questionnaires. For that reason, we would not claim that De-Viced is a particular percentage more effective simply because its reduction was larger.
The clearest comparison is the pattern after the intervention. In several published studies, improvements began to fade once the intervention ended. In the De-Viced pilot, the opposite happened: the reduction in PSU grew from 42% at program completion to 52% at follow-up.
Can results from different PSU questionnaires be compared?
Different studies use different validated questionnaires to measure problematic smartphone use, so exact percentage comparisons should always be treated with caution.
There is, however, substantial overlap in what the questionnaires are designed to measure.
As a small internal check, nine De-Viced participants completed both the MPUMP questionnaire used in the study and the SAS-SV questionnaire used in several other published interventions. Their SAS-SV scores fell by 33%, compared with 30% on MPUMP.
The sample is too small to establish that the two scales are directly comparable, but the result suggests that reductions of a similar order of magnitude may be meaningful to compare.
