Wear-IT : implications of mobile & wearable technologies to human attention and interruptibility

This thesis explores different ways of leveraging mobile sensing to understand how end users use and interact with their smart technologies, namely smartphones and smartwatches. These topics are extensively explored in other parallel research; however, numerous gaps still exist within the literature. The use of mobile sensing to collect quantified ground-truth information of device use in-the-wild is critical to collect unbiased experiences and usage traces. This thesis covers three main themes:

(a) the way our affect influences our smartphone use, and how our smartphone usage can also be analysed from our usage habits;

(b) revealing quantified exploration of smartwatch usage traits, and how these relate to smartphone use, and

(c) novel ways to mitigate interruptions during smartphone or smartwatch use.

The thesis begins by explaining the related work and the overall theme of mobile sensing and how device usage influences attention; it then proceeds to elaborate on the contribution of each included article to the overall scope of the thesis. The thesis then concludes with a summary of how the presented articles tie together in a broader scope. Considering the vast amount of research in this field by this thesis’ author as well as other researchers, this type of work can potentially improve the use of novel wearable technologies in the future. By the end of the thesis, the reader should have a broad understanding of what mobile sensing is, and how it can be applied to comprehensively uncover technology use as well as leveraging mobile sensing to enhance the use of technology.