Research Projects

Interruption in the Home

I have worked with Kris Nagel and Gregory Abowd at Georgia Tech to explore how these same issues change when dealing with home environments (Nagel, Hudson, & Abowd, 2004). Although this research aimed to develop a list of potential sensors for ubiquitous computing solutions, it also highlighted a number of ways that interruption is complicated in home life. In the home, notions of location and task are often more fluid while temporal cycles are more rigid. This work also raised a number of questions about privacy in collaboration and the challenges of introducing sensor-based technologies into personal spaces. In follow-up work (Nagel, Hudson, & Abowd, 2005), we have been working on developing more sophisticated predictive models of ideal times for interruption based on an understanding of routines in the household.

Publications

Nagel, K. S., Hudson, J. M., & Abowd, G. (2004). Predictors of Availability in Home-Life Context Mediated Communication. Proceedings of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 497 - 506. Chicago, IL: ACM Press.

Nagel, K. S., Hudson, J. M., & Abowd, G. (2005). "Between Dinner and Children's Bedtime": Predicting and Justifying Routines in the Home. Atlanta, GA: GVU Technical Reports (GIT-GVU-05-31), Georgia Institute of Technology.