A message may arrive immediately, but that does not mean its recipient is
ready to read it. We investigated whether ordinary phone activity could
indicate attentiveness, momentary boredom, or a person's longer-term tendency
to become bored.
In the first study, we followed 24 people for two weeks. Using signals
available on the phone, such as recent screen and notification activity, the
proximity sensor, ringer mode, time of day, and individual usage patterns, our
model predicted whether a message would be seen within about six minutes. It
reached 70.6% accuracy, with 81.2% precision when predicting rapid attention.
For the boredom work, we combined Android activity logs with short questions
asked in the moment. After exclusions, the dataset contained 4,398 reports
from 54 participants. Our models used communication recency, phone use,
unlocking, notifications, time, and demographic information. They achieved
between 74.6% and 82.9% AUC, depending on how boredom was defined and whether
a boredom-proneness questionnaire was available.
In a separate two-week deployment with 16 participants, we tested whether
people were more likely to open recommended content when the model predicted
boredom. The median click-through ratio was 20.5% for
boredom-triggered recommendations, compared with 8% for recommendations
delivered without that trigger. The experiment used one content source and
was too small to establish that the result would generalize to other
recommendations or populations.
We treated attention as opening a message within a time threshold
and boredom as self-report. Neither measure tells us whether an interruption
is welcome, whether someone understands a message, or why they use their phone
in a particular way.
Martin Pielot, Rodrigo De Oliveira, Haewoon Kwak, Nuria Oliver (2014). Didn't You See My Message? Predicting Attentiveness to Mobile Instant Messages. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2014), 3319-3328. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2556973
BibTeX
@inproceedings{pielot2014message,
author = {Martin Pielot and Rodrigo De Oliveira and Haewoon Kwak and Nuria Oliver},
title = {Didn't You See My Message? Predicting Attentiveness to Mobile Instant Messages},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2014)},
pages = {3319--3328},
year = 2014,
doi = {10.1145/2556288.2556973},
cites = 266,
citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}
Martin Pielot, Tilman Dingler, Jose San Pedro, Nuria Oliver (2015). When Attention Is Not Scarce: Detecting Boredom from Mobile Phone Usage. Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2015), 825-836. https://doi.org/10.1145/2750858.2804252
BibTeX
@inproceedings{pielot2015boredom,
author = {Martin Pielot and Tilman Dingler and Jose San Pedro and Nuria Oliver},
title = {When Attention Is Not Scarce: Detecting Boredom from Mobile Phone Usage},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2015)},
pages = {825--836},
year = 2015,
doi = {10.1145/2750858.2804252},
award = {Best Paper Award},
cites = 257,
citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}
Aleksandar Matic, Martin Pielot, Nuria Oliver (2015). Boredom-Computer Interaction: Boredom Proneness and the Use of Smartphone. Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2015), 837-841. https://doi.org/10.1145/2750858.2807530
BibTeX
@inproceedings{matic2015boredom,
author = {Aleksandar Matic and Martin Pielot and Nuria Oliver},
title = {Boredom-Computer Interaction: Boredom Proneness and the Use of Smartphone},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2015)},
pages = {837--841},
year = 2015,
doi = {10.1145/2750858.2807530},
cites = 63,
citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}
Martin Pielot, Linas Baltrunas, Nuria Oliver (2015). Boredom-Triggered Proactive Recommendations. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services Adjunct (MobileHCI 2015), 1106-1110. https://doi.org/10.1145/2786567.2794340
BibTeX
@inproceedings{pielot2015triggered,
author = {Martin Pielot and Linas Baltrunas and Nuria Oliver},
title = {Boredom-Triggered Proactive Recommendations},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services Adjunct (MobileHCI 2015)},
pages = {1106--1110},
year = 2015,
doi = {10.1145/2786567.2794340},
cites = 16,
citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}
Benjamin Poppinga, Martin Pielot, Niels Henze, Nuria Oliver, Karen Church, Alireza Sahami Shirazi (2015). Smarttention, Please! Intelligent Attention Management on Mobile Devices. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services Adjunct (MobileHCI 2015), 1066-1069. https://doi.org/10.1145/2786567.2795399
BibTeX
@inproceedings{poppinga2015smarttention,
author = {Benjamin Poppinga and Martin Pielot and Niels Henze and Nuria Oliver and Karen Church and Alireza Sahami Shirazi},
title = {Smarttention, Please! Intelligent Attention Management on Mobile Devices},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services Adjunct (MobileHCI 2015)},
pages = {1066--1069},
year = 2015,
doi = {10.1145/2786567.2795399},
cites = 11,
citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}