With the increase of connected devices and online services, the number of notifications received by each person is growing. Although notifications are useful to inform users about important information such as new messages and events, the continuous interruptions, the notification duplication, and the rigid delivery can be sources of discomfort.
The paper AwareNotifications: Multi-Device Semantic Notification Handling with User-Defined Preferences, published in the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, presents AwareNotifications, an intelligent system to overcome these issues. AwareNotifications is based on user-defined preferences to manage multi-device notifications, powered by Semantic Web technologies. By directly exploiting user preferences in the semantic reasoning process, the system is able to identify suitable device(s), modality, and moment(s) to deliver the incoming user notifications. The work was evaluated in a user study with 15 participants, in which we compared our system with the "traditional" notification delivery system, available in contemporary mobile and IoT settings. The study confirmed the perceived effectiveness of AwareNotifications, and provides insights to further improve the system.
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