Engagement-aware computing: modelling user engagement from mobile contexts

In this paper, we examine the potential of using mobile context to model user engagement. Taking an experimental approach, we systematically explore the dynamics of user engagement with a smartphone through three different studies. Specifically, to understand the feasibility of detecting user engagement from mobile context, we first assess an EEG artifact with 10 users and observe a strong correlation between automatically detected engagement scores and user's subjective perception of engagement. Grounded on this result, we model a set of application level features derived from smartphone usage of 10 users to detect engagement of a usage session using a Random Forest classifier. Finally, we apply this model to train a variety of contextual factors acquired from smartphone usage logs of 130 users to predict user engagement using an SVM classifier with a F1-Score of 0.82. Our experimental results highlight the potential of mobile contexts in designing engagement-aware applications and provide guidance to future explorations.