The impact of unwanted multimodal notifications

Multimodal interaction can be used to make home care technology more effective and appropriate, particularly for people with sensory impairments. Previous work has revealed how disruptive notifications in different modalities are to a home-based task, but has not investigated how disruptive unwanted notifications might be. An experiment was conducted which evaluated the disruptive effects of unwanted notifications when delivered in textual, pictographic, abstract visual, speech, earcon, auditory icon, tactile and olfactory modalities. It was found that for all the modalities tested, both wanted and unwanted notifications produced similar reductions in error rate and task success, independent of modality. The results demonstrate the need to control and limit the number of unwanted notifications delivered in the home and contribute to a large body of work advocating the inclusion of multiple interaction modalities.