SwitchBack: Using Focus and Saccade Tracking to Guide Users’ Attention for Mobile Task Resumption
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Smartphones and tablets are often used in dynamic environments that force users to break focus and attend to their surroundings, creating a form of “situational impairment.” Current mobile devices have no ability to sense when users divert or restore their attention, let alone provide support for resuming tasks. We therefore introduce SwitchBack, a system that allows mobile device users to resume tasks more efficiently. SwitchBack is built upon Focus and Saccade Tracking (FAST), which uses the front-facing camera to determine when the user is looking and how their eyes are moving across the screen. In a controlled study, we found that FAST can identify how many lines the user has read in a body of text within a mean absolute percent error of just 3.9%. We then tested SwitchBack in a dual focus-of-attention task, finding that SwitchBack improved average reading speed by 7.7% in the presence of distractions.