Abstract—With the advance of internet technology, wireless and mobile computing have become more and more popular and has been an integral part of our daily life. The paper attempts to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the impact of the wireless and mobile computing on our society. Specifically, a comprehensive literature survey will be studied to investigate the impacts of wireless and mobile computing on social economics, politics, education, human health, environment, and cybersecurity. The economic impact on our society has been huge from the service providers, hardware manufacturers, and online mobile shopping that have been part of the growth of this sector of business. The controversial Radio Frequency Electromagnetic Fields, the driving distraction of mobile device, and the application of wireless wearable devices in the health field are among the popular topics on human health impacts. The increase use of the mobile devices has successfully shifted the news to somewhat interactive social media. Along with the advance in internet technology and mobile computing, online education becomes more and more popular and provide better accessibility to students to configure a schedule that works around their schedule if they are working, however, it finds out that students who use computers consistently at school surprisingly have the worst learning results, and that is even true when accounting for socio-economic and demographics of the students. The toxic elements, the parts of the devices disposed, the ever increasing energy to produce the mobile devices and the use of the mobile computing are among the critical aspects of the environmental impacts of mobile computing. Cybersecurity is big threat to the cyber, especially to wireless and mobile computing. Malware, phishing, ransomware, man in the middle attacks and malicious insider actions are the most popular security threats to wireless and mobile computing.


Index Terms—Social economic, environmental, human health, cybersecurity, wireless and mobile computing.

Cite: Bridget A. Nee and Manghui Tui, "The Social Economic, Environmental, Human Health, and Cybersecurity Impacts of Wireless and Mobile Computing," Journal of Communications, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 32-39, 2018. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.13.1.32-39.