AwareNotifications: Multi-Device Semantic Notification Handling with User-Defined Preferences

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. To overcome these issues, we present AwareNotifications, an intelligent system based on user-defined preferences to manage multi-device notifications. AwareNotifications is 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. We evaluated AwareNotifications in a user study with 15 participants, in which we compared our system with the "traditional" notification delivery system. The study confirms the perceived effectiveness of AwareNotifications, and provides insights to further improve the system.