The number of smartphone users in the United Kingdom was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2029 by in total 2.8 million users (+4.92 percent). After the fifteenth consecutive increasing year, the smartphone user base is estimated to reach 59.72 million users and therefore a new peak in 2029. Notably, the number of smartphone users of was continuously increasing over the past years.Smartphone users here are limited to internet users of any age using a smartphone. The shown figures have been derived from survey data that has been processed to estimate missing demographics.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).

We are publishing a walking activity dataset including inertial and positioning information from 19 volunteers, including reference distance measured using a trundle wheel. The dataset includes a total of 96.7 Km walked by the volunteers, split into 203 separate tracks. The trundle wheel is of two types: it is either an analogue trundle wheel, which provides the total amount of meters walked in a single track, or it is a sensorized trundle wheel, which measures every revolution of the wheel, therefore recording a continuous incremental distance.
Each track has data from the accelerometer and gyroscope embedded in the phones, location information from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), and the step count obtained by the device. The dataset can be used to implement walking distance estimation algorithms and to explore data quality in the context of walking activity and physical capacity tests, fitness, and pedestrian navigation. Methods The proposed dataset is a collection of walks where participants used their own smartphones to capture inertial and positioning information. The participants involved in the data collection come from two sites. The first site is the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, United Kingdom, where 10 participants (7 affected by cardiovascular diseases and 3 healthy individuals) performed unsupervised 6MWTs in an outdoor environment of their choice (ethical approval obtained by the UK National Health Service Health Research Authority protocol reference numbers: 17/WM/0355). All participants involved provided informed consent. The second site is at Malm ̈o University, in Sweden, where a group of 9 healthy researchers collected data. This dataset can be used by researchers to develop distance estimation algorithms and how data quality impacts the estimation.

All walks were performed by holding a smartphone in one hand, with an app collecting inertial data, the GNSS signal, and the step counting. On the other free hand, participants held a trundle wheel to obtain the ground truth distance. Two different trundle wheels were used: an analogue trundle wheel that allowed the registration of a total single value of walked distance, and a sensorized trundle wheel which collected timestamps and distance at every 1-meter revolution, resulting in continuous incremental distance information. The latter configuration is innovative and allows the use of temporal windows of the IMU data as input to machine learning algorithms to estimate walked distance. In the case of data collected by researchers, if the walks were done simultaneously and at a close distance from each other, only one person used the trundle wheel, and the reference distance was associated with all walks that were collected at the same time.The walked paths are of variable length, duration, and shape. Participants were instructed to walk paths of increasing curvature, from straight to rounded. Irregular paths are particularly useful in determining limitations in the accuracy of walked distance algorithms. Two smartphone applications were developed for collecting the information of interest from the participants' devices, both available for Android and iOS operating systems. The first is a web-application that retrieves inertial data (acceleration, rotation rate, orientation) while connecting to the sensorized trundle wheel to record incremental reference distance [1]. The second app is the Timed Walk app [2], which guides the user in performing a walking test by signalling when to start and when to stop the walk while collecting both inertial and positioning data. All participants in the UK used the Timed Walk app.

The data collected during the walk is from the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) of the phone and, when available, the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). In addition, the step count information is retrieved by the sensors embedded in each participant’s smartphone. With the dataset, we provide a descriptive table with the characteristics of each recording, including brand and model of the smartphone, duration, reference total distance, types of signals included and additionally scoring some relevant parameters related to the quality of the various signals. The path curvature is one of the most relevant parameters. Previous literature from our team, in fact, confirmed the negative impact of curved-shaped paths with the use of multiple distance estimation algorithms [3]. We visually inspected the walked paths and clustered them in three groups, a) straight path, i.e. no turns wider than 90 degrees, b) gently curved path, i.e. between one and five turns wider than 90 degrees, and c) curved path, i.e. more than five turns wider than 90 degrees. Other features relevant to the quality of collected signals are the total amount of time above a threshold (0.05s and 6s) where, respectively, inertial and GNSS data were missing due to technical issues or due to the app going in the background thus losing access to the sensors, sampling frequency of different data streams, average walking speed and the smartphone position. The start of each walk is set as 0 ms, thus not reporting time-related information. Walks locations collected in the UK are anonymized using the following approach: the first position is fixed to a central location of the city of Oxford (latitude: 51.7520, longitude: -1.2577) and all other positions are reassigned by applying a translation along the longitudinal and latitudinal axes which maintains the original distance and angle between samples. This way, the exact geographical location is lost, but the path shape and distances between samples are maintained. The difference between consecutive points “as the crow flies” and path curvature was numerically and visually inspected to obtain the same results as the original walks. Computations were made possible by using the Haversine Python library.

Multiple datasets are available regarding walking activity recognition among other daily living tasks. However, few studies are published with datasets that focus on the distance for both indoor and outdoor environments and that provide relevant ground truth information for it. Yan et al. [4] introduced an inertial walking dataset within indoor scenarios using a smartphone placed in 4 positions (on the leg, in a bag, in the hand, and on the body) by six healthy participants. The reference measurement used in this study is a Visual Odometry System embedded in a smartphone that has to be worn at the chest level, using a strap to hold it. While interesting and detailed, this dataset lacks GNSS data, which is likely to be used in outdoor scenarios, and the reference used for localization also suffers from accuracy issues, especially outdoors. Vezovcnik et al. [5] analysed estimation models for step length and provided an open-source dataset for a total of 22 km of only inertial walking data from 15 healthy adults. While relevant, their dataset focuses on steps rather than total distance and was acquired on a treadmill, which limits the validity in real-world scenarios. Kang et al. [6] proposed a way to estimate travelled distance by using an Android app that uses outdoor walking patterns to match them in indoor contexts for each participant. They collect data outdoors by including both inertial and positioning information and they use average values of speed obtained by the GPS data as reference labels. Afterwards, they use deep learning models to estimate walked distance obtaining high performances. Their results share that 3% to 11% of the data for each participant was discarded due to low quality. Unfortunately, the name of the used app is not reported and the paper does not mention if the dataset can be made available.

This dataset is heterogeneous under multiple aspects. It includes a majority of healthy participants, therefore, it is not possible to generalize the outcomes from this dataset to all walking styles or physical conditions. The dataset is heterogeneous also from a technical perspective, given the difference in devices, acquired data, and used smartphone apps (i.e. some tests lack IMU or GNSS, sampling frequency in iPhone was particularly low). We suggest selecting the appropriate track based on desired characteristics to obtain reliable and consistent outcomes.

This dataset allows researchers to develop algorithms to compute walked distance and to explore data quality and reliability in the context of the walking activity. This dataset was initiated to investigate the digitalization of the 6MWT, however, the collected information can also be useful for other physical capacity tests that involve walking (distance- or duration-based), or for other purposes such as fitness, and pedestrian navigation.

The article related to this dataset will be published in the proceedings of the IEEE MetroXRAINE 2024 conference, held in St. Albans, UK, 21-23 October.

This research is partially funded by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation and the Internet of Things and People research center through the Synergy project Intelligent and Trustworthy IoT Systems.

The global number of smartphone users in was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2029 by in total 1.8 billion users (+42.62 percent). After the fifteenth consecutive increasing year, the smartphone user base is estimated to reach 6.1 billion users and therefore a new peak in 2029. Notably, the number of smartphone users of was continuously increasing over the past years.Smartphone users here are limited to internet users of any age using a smartphone. The shown figures have been derived from survey data that has been processed to estimate missing demographics.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).Find more key insights for the number of smartphone users in countries like the Americas and Asia.

This project was undertaken by an interdisciplinary team of researchers with backgrounds in public health and media and cultural studies and by working closely with the project's partners - Terrence Higgins Trust, London Friend and Waverley Care - all key third sector organisations working with gay and bisexual men. Drawing on these various expertise, we undertook in-depth qualitative interviews 43 queer men from two different locations in the UK - London and Edinburgh. The project explored how queer men in the UK used smartphones and digital technologies to mediate intimacy.

This project data set includes 43 semi-structured qualitative interviews with gay and bisexual - or queer men - including cis (33) and trans (10) men based in London and Edinburgh. Interviews were undertaken online between July 2020 and January 2021, during the first year of the COVID pandemic in a period before vaccines were available.

Topics covered include sexualities, relationships, intimacy, racism, transphobia, disability, vulnerability, COVID-19 mitigations, hook-up or dating apps, media and culture.

Since smartphones became widely available in 2007 both media, communications & cultural studies and public health academics have been researching how gay and bisexual men use them to negotiate their cultures of intimacy. This research has tended to focus on how these men use 'hook-up' applications, such as Grindr and Scruff, to organise casual sex encounters, particularly in relation to safer sex negotiation. In doing so, much of this research has enriched our understanding of gay and bisexual men's casual sex practices; informed HIV prevention strategies; and begun to shed light on the role of digital media in both of these related contexts.

However, by focusing on hook-up apps, this research has so far overlooked some important issues that relate to smartphone use and intimacy amongst these men. Gay and bisexual men do not only use hook-up apps to negotiate their intimate lives, which are not exclusively defined by casual sex; they frequently migrate between different aspects of their smartphones (e.g. the phone itself, the camera, other social media applications) to practice different sorts of intimacy (e.g. monogamous relationships, open relationships, one off sexual encounters, on-going casual sex partners, infidelities). Researching these practices will have implications not only for popular understandings of gay and bisexual male intimacy (which are often over-determined by casual sex), but also for how effectively the public health sector can provide services that improve the overall health and wellbeing of these men beyond HIV prevention.

The existing research also has a tendency to decontextualize this smartphone use, not fully accounting for the wider socio-cultural conditions in which this use takes place. Gay and bisexual men use smartphones to negotiate intimacy in socio-cultural contexts in which not only ideas and attitudes towards gay and bisexual men are changing (e.g. the legalization of gay marriage, liberalization of more general attitudes to gay and bisexual men) but the material conditions in which they practice intimacy are changing too (e.g. changes in gay nightlife; changes in HIV prevention and treatment; and constantly updating smartphone and internet technologies). This project begins from the cultural studies perspective that media use cannot be adequately made sense of outside of the cultures in which this use takes place. It therefore aims to understand the various ways that gay and bisexual men use different aspects of their smartphones to negotiate different sorts of intimacies within these constantly shifting socio-cultural conditions.

In 2022, smartphone vendors sold around 1.39 billion smartphones were sold worldwide, with this number forecast to drop to 1.34 billion in 2023.

Smartphone penetration rate still on the rise

Less than half of the world’s total population owned a smart device in 2016, but the smartphone penetration rate has continued climbing, reaching 78.05 percent in 2020. By 2025, it is forecast that almost 87 percent of all mobile users in the United States will own a smartphone, an increase from the 27 percent of mobile users in 2010.

Smartphone end user sales

In the United States alone, sales of smartphones were projected to be worth around 73 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, an increase from 18 billion dollars in 2010. Global sales of smartphones are expected to increase from 2020 to 2021 in every major region, as the market starts to recover from the initial impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

The smartphone penetration in Europe was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2029 by in total 7.9 percentage points. After the fifteenth consecutive increasing year, the penetration is estimated to reach 89.83 percent and therefore a new peak in 2029. Notably, the smartphone penetration of was continuously increasing over the past years.The penetration rate refers to the share of the total population.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).Find more key insights for the smartphone penetration in countries like the Americas and North America.

The number of Apple iPhone unit sales dramatically increased between 2007 and 2023. Indeed, in 2007, when the iPhone was first introduced, Apple shipped around 1.4 million smartphones. By 2023, this number reached over 231 million units.

The newest models and iPhone’s lasting popularity

Apple has ventured into its 17th smartphone generation with its Phone 15 lineup, which, released in September 2023, includes the 15, 15 Plus, 15 Pro and Pro Max. Powered by the A16 bionic chip and running on iOS 17, these models present improved displays, cameras, and functionalities. On the one hand, such features come, however, with hefty price tags, namely, an average of 1,000 U.S. dollars. On the other hand, they contribute to making Apple among the leading smartphone vendors worldwide, along with Samsung and Xiaomi. In the first quarter of 2024, Samsung shipped over 60 million smartphones, while Apple recorded shipments of roughly 50 million units.

Success of Apple’s other products

Apart from the iPhone, which is Apple’s most profitable product, Apple is also the inventor of other heavy-weight players in the consumer electronics market. The Mac computer and the iPad, like the iPhone, are both pioneers in their respective markets and have helped popularize the use of PCs and tablets. The iPad is especially successful, having remained as the largest vendor in the tablet market ever since its debut. The hottest new Apple gadget is undoubtedly the Apple Watch, which is a line of smartwatches that has fitness tracking capabilities and can be integrated via iOS with other Apple products and services. The Apple Watch has also been staying ahead of other smart watch vendors since its initial release and secures around 50 percent of the market share as of the latest quarter.