Background: Personal and educational use of smartphone is common.

Objective: To examine the smartphone use among medical students at Thammasat Medical School.

Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed by recruiting 200 medical students in clinical years at Thammasat Medical School. Respondents completed a self-administered questionnaire asking about their smartphone use for specific purposes in daily life. Their grade point averages (GPA) from the previous semester were collected.

Results: The authors found the medical students spent a mean time of 6.9 hours (SD 3.5 hours) per day using smartphones. They used smartphones mostly for social media, with a mean duration of 2.9 hours (SD 2.6 hours). The most popular medical application/website used for medical education was “Google”, followed by “Medscape”, “Up to date”, and “Clinical key”, respectively. A negative Spearman rank correlation (r=–0.19, p<0.012) was found between GPA and total hours spent using smartphones.

Conclusion: The present study demonstrated the importance of smartphone use in the daily lives of medical students. Smartphones had both positive and negative impacts on medical education.

Keywords: Smartphone; Behavior; Medical students; Grade point average

DOI: 10.35755/jmedassocthai.2022.09.11972

Received 5 October 2020 | Revised 31 August 2022 | Accepted 8 August 2022