The Effect of Smartphone Usage at Bedtime and its Relationship with Insomnia and Academic Performance among Majmaah University Students

Introduction: Smartphone surely has become an indispensable technical companion for the humans, nowadays most of the routine activities are highly dependent upon using the smartphones, especially the educational activities. Smartphone owns most of our time due to fast and ease of access that it offers. Unfortunately, uncontrolled use of these devises may reflect passively on human and student's health. Objective: The purpose of this study was to find out whether smartphone usage at bedtime effects the sleep quality and academic performance of Majmaah university students. Methodology: This analytical cross-sectional study was conducted among the students of Majmaah University, Saudi Arabia studying in the various colleges from February - April 2020. The data was collected by a self-prepared questionnaire from 373 participants using consecutive sampling method. Results: We found that 96.5% of the participants were using smartphones at bedtime, 45% of those using smartphones at bedtime had poor sleep quality, and the top purpose of using the smartphone was for social interaction, followed by study purpose, then the games, and finally for watching films. Also, 80% of those with a GPA below 2.5 were having difficulty in initiation the sleep, and 47.5% of those who had difficulty in initiation the sleep found that this difficulty is affecting their academic performance. Conclusion: Our study found that the usage of smartphone at bedtime is highly prevalent among the students of Majmaah university, Using the smartphone at bedtime has affected the sleep of the students and increased the chances of getting insomnia and poor sleep quality which is affecting their academic performance. This relationship is attributed to the blue light coming from smartphone primary as well as other factors such as thinking about what is going on in the social media or video games arena.