Interruptibility Map: Geographical analysis of users' interruptibility in smart cities

Abstract

Investigating users' interruptibility as an indicator of his/her attention status has been essential in recent pervasive computing where the users' attention resources get scarce against ever increasing amounts of information. In this paper, we address research problems related to the users' available interruptibility, their physical activities, and their current locations and situations. We propose the “Interruptibility Map”, a geographical tool for analyzing and visualizing the user's local interruptibility status in the context of smart city research. Our map describes where citizens are expected to feel more or less interruptive against notifications produced by computing devices, which are known to have negative effects on work productivity, emotion, and psychological state. We conducted a continuous analysis from our previous research and a new additional in-the-wild user study for 2 weeks with 29 participants to investigate the relationship between one's interruptibility and their locations and situations. As a highlight of our findings, we found certain pairs of user activity change and a location that showed better interruptibility to users, such as an activity change of “when user's riding car(bus) stops” in the bus commute situation.