Investigating the role of task engagement in mobile interruptibility

Context-awareness of mobile phones is a cornerstone of recent efforts in automatic determination of user interruptibility. Modalities such as a user's location, her physical activity, time of day, can be used in machine learning models to infer if a user is going to welcome an incoming notification or not. However, the success of context-aware interruptibility systems questions the existing theory of interruptibility, that is based on the internal state of the user, not her surroundings. In this work we examine the role of a user's internal context, defined by her engagement in the current task, on the sentiment towards an interrupting mobile notification. We collect and analyse real-world data on interruptibility of twenty subjects over two weeks, and show that the internal state indeed impacts user interruptibility.