If you have never wondered how dirty your phone really is, maybe you should take a second to think about it now.
If you were to guess how many times you touch your phone in a day, what would you say? Given that you are awake around 16 hours a day, in which 3 of those hours are spent eating, there are 13 hours left. If we average about touching our phones 100 times an hour (taking the extreme), that would put us at 1300 times. However, research by dscout wherein they recruited 100,000 participants and tracked the user's interaction with their smartphones for five days observed that "people tapped, swiped and clicked a whopping 2,617 times each day, on average," and the people who used their phones the most, which they quantified as the top 10%, were reported to have "5,427 touches a day"!
An article published at the University of Arizona has also stated that "cellphones carry 10 times more bacteria than most toilet seats." What's more, a 2011 study in Britain revealed that "1 in 6 UK cell phones is contaminated with fecal matter." That is quite concerning if we consider the fact that we sleep, eat, and perform almost all every activity alongside these small devices.
Not only are these results disturbing, but it appears that the microorganisms on the phone may also affect some people in serious, dangerous ways.
When the contamination rate of cell phones owned by healthcare workers in hospital settings was studied in 2008, it was concluded that both the healthcare workers' cell phones and hands "were contaminated with various types of microorganisms" that "may be a source of nosocomial (originating in the hospital) infections in hospitals." It thus poses a greater infectious threat to those who are immunosuppressed.
To practice daily hygiene, it might be best then, to incorporate daily routines to clean your phone. Because these high-tech devices are sensitive to aqueous solutions, you might want to refrain from directly spraying disinfectant onto your smartphone. Perhaps wiping it down with a clean cloth and a tech-friendly cleanser may be a good option.
