Addiction is supposedly a young person’s game. Statistics show that substance use disorders peak when people are in their 20s and gradually decline with age.

There are some addictions, however, that go against demographic trends. We recently wrote about how drug overdoses among women with children are skyrocketing. And there are other addictions, such as eating addiction, gambling addiction, and smartphone addiction, that are age-resilient.

Case in point, The Economist last week ran an article on smartphone addiction among the elderly. It seems that Baby Boomers are hip to technology and like their smartphones a lot.

The anonymous author of the piece relies on a seven-country survey conducted by GWI, a research firm, showing that people aged 65 and up have a 95% smartphone ownership rate and are top adopters of computers, smart TVs, tablets, digital cameras, and e-readers.

There’s quite a distance between high phone ownership rates and smartphone addiction. Smartphone addiction requires many elements, including:

• The user wants to reduce usage but is unable to
• Smartphone usage is interfering with school, work, or family life
• The user knows their usage is causing self-harm but still won’t cut back

Even if seniors do use their phones excessively — and the evidence is thin for that — it’s not an addiction unless it’s ruining their lives and they want to stop but can’t. How large is that group?

The Economist points to a 2022 survey from South Korea that estimated 15% of those 60-69 years old were “at risk of phone addiction.” A more recent survey of 94 individuals at the Sakarya Metropolitan Municipality Elderly Support and Coordination Center in India used the short form of the Smartphone Addiction Scale to determine dependency.

The survey excluded persons with severe visual or hearing impairments, psychiatric disorders or conditions, or physical disabilities that might make it difficult for them to use a smartphone. Overall, 51.1% of participants were female, 80.9% were married, and 19.2% were smokers.

The group without smartphone addiction consisted of 49 participants and the group with smartphone addiction consisted of 45 participants. The findings drew a pretty strong correlation between smartphone addiction and declines in physical activity, activities of daily life (ADL), and physical balance: 

In this study, it was determined that the physical activity levels of participants with smartphone addiction were lower than those without addiction and that physical activity levels decreased as addiction occurred.

The authors of the study notice a distinct spiraling effect where excessive use of the smartphone among the elderly leads to declining health, which leads in turn to increased smartphone usage. Declining health is attributed to a reduction in physical activity and disruption of the sleep cycle.

The study from India helps us understand what smartphone addiction looks like for the elderly population, but it does not help us estimate how prevalent it is and whether the problem is becoming worse.

The article in The Economist is likewise not much help in assessing the prevalence of senior smartphone addiction. It peters out into a series of weak endorsements for the benefits of smartphone use, including a systematic review involving 400,000 seniors that found, “over-50s who regularly used digital devices had lower rates of cognitive decline than those who did not.”

Until seniors are using their smartphones so much that it impacts their sleep, their health, and their personal relationships, we should probably be encouraging senior smartphone use for improved cognition and connectivity.

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published October 30, 2025.

Sources:

“Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly,” The Economist, October 25, 2025.

“Smartphone addiction among elderly individuals: its relationship with physical activity, activities of daily living, and balance levels,” BMC Public Health, March 11, 2025.

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