Assessing the perceptibility of smartphone notifications in smart lighting spaces

Abstract

In smart spaces with connected smart lighting, there is an opportunity to deliver smartphone notifications using peripheral light, along with using standard smartphone modalities such as sound, vibration and LEDs, in order to help a user perceive them without constantly monitoring their mobile device. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of on-device and extra-device modalities through smart lighting. We address a gap in literature by establishing a foundation that explains the role of modalities with which a notification is delivered on a mobile device. For this purpose, we conducted two ecologically valid and carefully designed experiments in a controlled environment that simulates multitasking in a smart home environment, and demonstrate that modality preferences are dependent on the environment context, by analysing subjective user data through a machine learning approach. We derive a set of guidelines for choosing notification modalities and set future research directions.

Exploring Ambient Air Quality Notifications for Smart Rooms

“…We believe that the primary task (TED talk, quiz) attracted the attention so much that participants showed a natural reaction to the vibration of the smartwatch and therefore they first checked the display on the smartwatch. This confirms the obtrusive character of the vibration channel [11,17] and may be too obtrusive for the meeting room context with ambient lighting as it seems to have a rather dominant effect on participants' attention and may prevent the ambient lighting from quickly moving to the center of attention.…”

“…That is, the brightness of the LED stripes faded repeatedly with a period of 3.5 seconds from bright to darker and then back to bright again, whereby the LED stripes in the darkest state still shined with low intensity. According to [11,15], too rapid changes in parameters, such as brightness, have been shown to be more distracting than gradual changes, which would interrupt or disturb processes or the concentration of participants in meetings. Therefore, we chose a noticeably different type of notification for the second condition, whereby the slow pulsing greatly alleviated the distracting character.…”

“…In our meeting room context, however, the audio channel as well as rapid pulsing ambient light would be too obtrusive for air quality notifications and would potentially disturb meetings too much. It is therefore very promising that the same effect can be achieved with ambient lighting [11].…”

“…Hence, we included the vibration channel in our work, however, in combination with ambient lighting notifications in the surrounding environment. In a perceptibility study, Komninos et al [11] investigated smartphone notifications together with ambient lighting. They conducted two experiments that simulated multi-tasking of users in a smarthome environment which is similar to our smart meeting room context.…”

SmartLED: Smartphone-Based Covert Channels Leveraging the Notification LED

“…Analysing the perceptibility of LED notifications, [27] concluded that only a fraction of users noticed LED blinks even when the phone was lying on the table. Going a step forward, [28] determined that LED notifications are easy to be missed. Thus, a smartphone blinking is not considered suspicious at all, though this study considers blinking features for better stealthiness.…”