A Study of Reusing Smartphones to Augment Elementary School Education

Society faces a severe environmental challenge posed by the rapid advance of technology scaling. The high cost in manufacturing energy, materials, and disposal is worrisome with the increasing number of smartphones. To mitigate the impact of future devices, the authors propose a design for reuse model in which obsolete devices will be reused for a class of applications that can be satisfied with older, less reliable technology. In particular, the authors find a good match between the reuse of smartphones and educational applications. The experiments indicate that the resource requirements of educational applications can be satisfied by repurposed smartphones. The key challenge is the design of software that can adapt to extreme heterogeneity of devices. To this end, the authors explore smartphone evolutions and characterize different types of heterogeneities among different generations of smartphones. The authors propose insights to aid establishing a sustainable model of designing mobile applications for phone reuse.