Informative Keyboard and its Application to Raise Awareness of Smartphone Use

TL;DR

This work tackles smartphone overuse by proposing the informative keyboard, a general-purpose smartphone output device that delivers color-coded usage feedback while typing, leveraging implicit interaction to reduce cognitive load. It introduces a heating up keyboard variant that maps a consolidated usage metric, via memory and AR filtering, to five temperature levels displayed through keypress pop-up colors. A proof-of-concept implementation on Android demonstrates feasibility, using $T_S$ ≈ 30 minutes, $T_N$ ≈ 5 minutes, forgetting coefficient $\alpha$, and strictness $s$ to produce $y_n$ that is quantized for feedback. An evaluation with 67 university students reports broadly favorable attitudes toward nonnumeric feedback and acceptable integration with typing, though participants note potential intrusiveness and advocate for customization and supplementary numerical data. The approach offers a lightweight, implicit complement to existing digital wellbeing tools and points to extensions in customization, context awareness, and alternative modalities for delivering feedback.

Abstract

Excessive smartphone use is now widely considered a personal and societal problem. It is recognized by application and smartphone makers, who provide tools to track the amount of use, set limits, or block certain services at predefined times. These tools, while powerful, may require significant cognitive effort to operate: configuration parameters need to be set, and captured statistics need to be analyzed. To offer a complementary solution, we propose a radically different approach. We employ the keyboard of a smartphone as an output device. With each press of a key, the user is given a high-level, qualitative, color-encoded estimate of the amount of recent smartphone use. The technique, dubbed the informative keyboard, is a case of implicit interaction: the user's intention is to enter text but, while typing, they receive the feedback. In the paper, we elaborate the concept, identify design decisions, describe our implementation, present the outcome of a questionnaire-based evaluation, and point to some other applications of the informative keyboard.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: The informative keyboard delivers information by changing the color of the background of pop-ups on keypresses. The user interprets the color in terms of a message. In the figure, three different messages are delivered at different times. Messages arrive at a low rate, so the color changes infrequently (there are many consecutive, same-color pop-ups). The messages are non-critical.
• Figure 2: The heating up keyboard provides feedback on the amount of smartphone use via red pop-ups of different saturation, as in heatmaps. The underlying feedback is referred to as the keyboard’s “temperature.”
• Figure 3: The evaluation questionnaire: basic information for participants on how the heating up keyboard works (slightly edited).
• Figure 4: The evaluation questionnaire: information for participants on how to interpret the keyboard’s temperature (slightly edited).