Title
Reducing users' perceived mental effort due to interruptive notifications in multi-device mobile environments
Abstract
In today's ubiquitous computing environment where users carry, manipulate, and interact with an increasing number of networked devices, applications and web services, human attention is the new bottleneck in computing. It is therefore important to minimize a user's mental effort due to notifications, especially in situations where users are mobile and using multiple wearable and mobile devices. To this end, we propose Attelia II, a novel middleware that identifies breakpoints in users' lives while using those devices, and delivers notifications at these moments. Attelia II works in real-time and uses only the mobile and wearable devices that users naturally use and wear, without any modifications to applications, and without any dedicated psycho-physiological sensors. Our in-the-wild evaluation in users' multi-device environment (smart phones and smart watches) with 41 participants for 1 month validated the effectiveness of Attelia. Our new physical activity-based breakpoint detection, in addition to the UI Event-based breakpoint detection, resulted in a 71.8% greater reduction of users' perception of workload, compared with our previous system that used UI events only. Adding this functionality to a smart watch reduced workload perception by 19.4% compared to random timing of notification deliveries. Our multi-device breakpoint detection across smart phones and watches resulted in about 3 times greater reduction in workload perception than our previous system.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2750858.2807517
ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
interruption overload, interruptibility, mobile sensing
Middleware,Wearable computer,Workload,Computer science,Human–computer interaction,Mobile device,Ubiquitous computing,Web service,Wearable technology,Multimedia,Smartwatch
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
33
1.38
27
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tadashi Okoshi126530.15
Julian Ramos219811.63
Hiroki Nozaki3645.12
Jin Nakazawa422848.11
Anind Dey511484959.91
Hideyuki Tokuda61489251.40