InterruptMe: Designing Intelligent Prompting Mechanisms for Pervasive Applications

The mobile phone represents a unique platform for interac-tive applications that can harness the opportunity of an im-mediate contact with a user in order to increase the impact of the delivered information. However, this accessibility does not necessarily translate to reachability, as recipients might refuse an initiated contact or disfavor a message that comes in an inappropriate moment. In this paper we seek to answer whether, and how, suitable moments for interruption can be identified and utilized in a mobile system. We gather and analyze a real-world smart-phone data trace and show that users ’ broader context, includ-ing their activity, location, time of day, emotions and engage-ment, determine different aspects of interruptibility. We then design and implement InterruptMe, an interruption manage-ment library for Android smartphones. An extensive exper-iment shows that, compared to a context-unaware approach, interruptions elicited through our library result in increased user satisfaction and shorter response times. Author Keywords Interruptibility; Mobile sensing; Context-aware computing