Reducing Smartwatch Users' Distraction with Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

Smartwatches provide a useful feature whereby users can be directly aware of incoming notifications by vibration. However, such prompt awareness causes high distractions to users. To remedy the distraction problem, we propose an intelligent notification management for smartwatch users. The goal of our management system is not only to reduce the annoying notifications but also to provide the important notifications that users will swiftly react to. To analyze how to respond to the notifications daily, we have collected 20,353 in-the-wild notifications. Subsequently, we trained the convolutional neural network models to classify important notifications according to the users' contexts. Finally, the proposed management allows important notifications to be forwarded to a smartwatch. As experiment results show, the proposed method can reduce the number of unwanted notifications on smartwatches by up to 81%.