Efficacy of mobile context-aware notification management systems: A systematic literature review and meta-analysis

Notifications can be relevant but they can also decrease productivity when delivered at the wrong point in time. Smartphones are increasingly capable of detecting relevant context information with the goal to decrease the number of these badly timed interruptions. Accordingly, research on context-aware notification management systems (CNMSs) on mobile devices has received increasing attention recently, prototypes have been built and empirically evaluated. However, there exists no systematic overview of mobile CNMSs evaluating their efficacy. The objectives of the current work are therefore to identify relevant empirical studies that have assessed the efficacy of mobile CNMSs and to discuss the findings with respect to future work. A systematic literature review and meta-analysis was conducted to address these objectives. Consistent with prior work, two efficacy metrics were applied: response rate and response delay. A keyword-based search strategy was used and resulted in 1'634 studies, out of which 8 were relevant for the topic. Findings indicate that mobile CNMSs increase the response rate, while there was only little evidence that they reduce response time, too. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed and future research is outlined that aims at further increasing the efficacy of mobile CNMSs.