Multimodal Support for Interruption Management: Models, Empirical Findings, and Design Recommendations

Interactive media-based services and applications have become ubiquitous and compete for our attention in our everyday lives. Similarly, operators in many data-rich event-driven workplaces, such as aviation, medicine, and process control, experience considerable attentional demands, as they assume new responsibilities and interact with a growing number of automated systems. These trends have led to an increased risk of frequent and sometimes untimely interruptions. Supporting the effective management of these interruptions is critical to avoid performance breakdowns on both the ongoing and the interrupting tasks. One promising means of achieving this goal is the introduction of multimodal interfaces that distribute information across sensory channels to ensure the reliable and timely detection, accurate interpretation, and appropriate handling of interrupting tasks and signals. This paper will provide a brief overview of well-known models of interruption management (IM), present related empirical findings on multimodal information processing, and discuss their implications for the design of multimodal interfaces that support interruption handling.