Stefan Schneegass

Towards pressure-based feedback for non-stressful tactile notifications

Smartphones, wearables, and other mobile devices often use tactile feedback for notifying users. This feedback type proved to be beneficial since it does not occupy the visual or auditory channel. However, it still can be distracting in other situations such as when users are already stressed. To investigate tactile feedback patterns which do not increase the users stress level, we developed two wrist-worn prototypes capable of providing tactile feedback (i.e., vibrotactile and pressure-based feedback). Further, we conducted a user-study with 14 participants comparing both feedback types. The results suggest that vibrotactile feedback increases the users stress level more, compared to pressure-based feedback particularly applied when the user currently has a low stress level. Consequently, we present implications for designing notifications for mobile and wearable devices.

Understanding User Preferences towards Rule-based Notification Deferral

Mobile devices generate a tremendous number of notifications every day. While some of them are important, a huge number of them are not of particular interest for the user. In this work, we investigate how users manually defer notifications using a rule-based approach. We provide three different types of rules, namely, suppressing, summarizing once a day, and snoozing to a specific point in time. In a user study with 16 participants, we explore how users apply these rules. We report on the usage behavior as well as feedback received during an interview. Last, we derive guidelines that inform future notification deferral systems.

EMS in HCI: challenges and opportunities in actuating human bodies

Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) recently received considerable attention in the HCI community. By applying small signals to the users body, different types of movement can be generated. These movements allow designers to create more meaningful and embodied haptic feedback compared to vibrotactile feedback. This advantage also comes with further technical and practical challenges which need to be tackled. These challenges include a fine grained calibration procedure and a close contact to the users body at specific on-body locations. This tutorial gives an overview about current research projects, challenges, and opportunities to use EMS for providing rich embodied feedback followed by a hands on experience. The main goal of this tutorial is that participants get a basic understanding of how EMS works and how systems that are using EMS can be developed and evaluated.

Demo of a smart plant system as an exemplary smart home application supporting non-urgent notifications.

The present work is a demonstration of a smart plant system that monitors the current water level of a plant. Since related work showed that users are already overwhelmed by notifications in their daily lives, how to design smart home applications that use notifications is an important research question. To study how users experience non-urgent smart home notifications in their daily lives, we decided to use a smart plant system that notifies the users when the plant needs water as an exemplary smart home application. We developed a fully functional smart plant system for the usage in in-situ studies. Our smart plant system can notify the users either using an integrated ambient display in the plant pot or by sending notifications to the users smartphones. Using these prototypes, we study the user experience of different strategies and locations to display non-urgent smart home notifications.

LYRA: smart wearable in-flight service assistant

We present LYRA, a modular in-flight system that enhances service and assists flight attendants during their work. LYRA enables passengers to browse and order services from their smartphones. Smart glasses and a smart shoe-clip with RFID reader module provides flight attendants with situated information. We gained first insights into how flight attendants and passengers use of the system during a long distance flight from Frankfurt to Houston.

Posture Sleeve: Using Smart Textiles for Public Display Interactions

Today, public displays are used to display general purpose information or advertisements in many public and urban spaces. In addition to that, research identified novel application scenarios for public displays. These scenarios, however, mainly include gesture- and posture-based interaction mainly relying on optical tracking. Deploying optical tracking systems in the real world is not always possible since real-world deployments have to tackle several challenges. These challenges include changing light conditions or privacy concerns. In this paper, we explore how smart fabric can detect the users posture. We particularly focus on the users arm posture and how this can be used for interacting with public displays. We conduct a preliminary study to record different arm postures, create a model to detect arm postures. Finally, we conduct an evaluation study using a simple game that uses the arm posture as input. We show that smart textiles are suitable to detect arm postures and feasible for this type of application scenarios.

Navigation Systems for Motorcyclists: Exploring Wearable Tactile Feedback for Route Guidance in the Real World

Current navigation systems for motor cyclists use visual or auditory cues for guidance. However, this poses a challenge to the motorcyclists since their visual and auditory channels are already occupied with controlling the motorbike, paying attention to other road users, and planing the next turn. In this work, we explore how tactile feedback can be used to guide motorcyclists. We present MOVING (MOtorbike VIbrational Navigation Guidance), a smart kidney belt that presents navigation cues through 12 vibration motors. In addition, we report on the design process of this wearable and on an evaluation with 16 participants in a real world riding setting. We show that MOVING outperforms off-the-shelf navigation systems in terms of turn errors and distraction.

A Design Space for Audience Sensing and Feedback Systems

Audience feedback is a valuable asset in many domains such as arts, education, and marketing. Artists can receive feedback on the experiences created through their performances. Similarly, teachers can receive feedback from students on the understandability of their course content. There are various methods to collect explicit feedback (e.g., questionnaires) - yet they usually impose a burden to the audience. Advances in physiological sensing opens up opportunities for collecting feedback implicitly. This creates unexplored dimensions in the design space of audience sensing. In this work, we chart a comprehensive design space for audience sensing based on a literature and market review which aims to support the designers process for creating novel feedback systems.

RainSense: exploring the concept of a sense for weather awareness

The amplification of human senses has been in the focus of contemporary research for the past decades. Apart from the replication of human organs, the functionality of the human body has been enhanced. While many approaches aim to augment existing sensory channels, our research purpose is to explore the creation of a new sense, namely a sense for weather awareness. For this, we present our concept which is based on the presentation of thermal stimuli. Hence, we initially explored the perception and suitability of thermal feedback stimuli to communicate weather information, and particularly precipitation in an experiment comprising 16 participants. From the qualitative and quantitative results we derive important findings helping us to advance the realization of our concept in future research involving a field study to further evaluate the creation of a sense for weather awareness.

Snooze!: investigating the user-defined deferral of mobile notifications

Notifications on mobile devices are a prominent source of interruptions. Previous work suggests using opportune moments to deliver notifications to reduce negative effects. In this paper, we instead explore the manual deferral of notifications. We developed an Android app that allows users to snooze mobile notifications for a user-defined amount of time or to a user-defined point in time. Using this app, we conducted a year-long in-the-wild study with 295 active users. To complement the findings, we recruited 16 further participants who used the app for one week and subsequently interviewed them. In both studies, snoozing was mainly used to defer notifications related to people and events. The reasons for deferral were manifold, from not being able to attend notifications immediately to not wanting to. Daily routines played an important role in the deferral of notifications. Most notifications were deferred to the same day or next morning, and a deferral of more than two days was an exception. Based on our findings, we derive design implications that can inform the design of future smart notification systems.