SCAN: Social context-aware smartphone notification system

SCAN (Social Context-Aware smartphone Notification system) introduces a novel way to reduce interruptions caused by smartphone notifications during a social interaction. It uses built-in smartphone sensors to detect the social context of a user and delivers notifications only when they do not interrupt an ongoing social interaction.

Article  |  Fall 2017

People may feel annoyed when they see their friends checking smartphones while having a conversation. Although people want to focus on a conversation, it is hard to ignore a series of notification alarms coming from their smartphones. It is reported that smartphone users receive an average of tens to hundreds of push notifications a day [1,2]. Despite its usefulness in the immediate delivery of information, an untimely smartphone notification is considered a source of distraction and annoyance during social interactions.

To address this problem, a research team from the Networking & Mobile Systems Lab (NMSL) at KAIST School of Computing, led by Prof. Sung-Ju Lee, has proposed a novel notification management scheme, in which the smartphone defers notifications until an opportune moment during social interactions. A “breakpoint” [3] is a term originating from psychology that describes a unit of time in between two adjacent actions. It is believed that breakpoints exist in which notifications do not interrupt a social interaction, or that they do so minimally.

To discover breakpoints, the research team devised a video survey in which participants watched a typical social interaction scenario and responded whether prompted moments in the video were appropriate moments to receive smartphone notifications. People responded that the following four instances were appropriate breakpoints in a social interaction: (1) a long pause, (2) a user leaving the table, (3) others using smartphones, and (4) a user left alone.

Based on the insights from the video survey, they designed and implemented a Social Context-Aware smartphone Notification system, SCAN, that defers smartphone notifications until a breakpoint. SCAN is a mobile application that detects social context using only built-in sensors. It also works collaboratively with the rest of the group members’ smartphones to sense collocated members, conversation, and others’ smartphone use. SCAN then classifies a breakpoint based on the social context and decides whether to deliver or defer notifications.

SCAN has been tested on ten groups of friends in a controlled setting. SCAN detected four target breakpoint types with high accuracy (precision= 92.0%, recall= 82.5%). Most participants appreciated the value of deferred notifications and found the selected breakpoints appropriate. Overall, this research demonstrated that breakpoint-based smartphone notification management is a promising approach to reducing interruptions during social interactions.

This work [4] was published and presented at the 20^th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2017) in February 2017. The research team, consisting of Chunjong Park and Junsung Lim, M.S. candidates, and Professors Sung-Ju Lee, Juho Kim, and Dongman Lee, is currently expanding SCAN to incorporate various types of social interactions. The ultimate goal of the team is to release SCAN as an Android application in the Google Play Store and help users to be less distracted by smartphone notifications during social interactions.

[1]“An In-situ Study of Mobile Phone Notifications”. Proceedings of MobileHCI 2014. Martin Pielot, Karen Church, and Rodrigo de Oliveira.
[2] “Hooked on Smartphones: An Exploratory Study on Smartphone Overuse Among College Students”. Proceedings of CHI 2014. Uichin Lee, Joonwon Lee, Minsam Ko, Changhun Lee, Yuhwan Kim, Subin Yang, Koji Yatani, Gahgene Gweon, Kyong-Mee Chung, and Junehwa Song.
[3] “The perceptual organization of ongoing behavior”. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 12, 5 (1976), 436–450. Darren Newtson and Gretchen Engquist.
[4] ““Don’t Bother Me. I’m Socializing!: A Breakpoint-Based Smartphone Notification System”. Proceedings of CSCW 2017. Chunjong Park, Junsung Lim, Juho Kim, Sung-Ju Lee, and Dongman Lee