New PC technology can block notifications when you’re busy

Multitasking is great but sometimes, one simply can’t take the pressure of dealing with a whole lot of tasks at the same time. For instance, when working on your PC, it can be annoying when right in the middle of something important or urgent, you start receiving pop-up notifications.

Such notifications not only distract you, they also waste your time when you have to attend to them only to find out they’re nothing significant. Now, the Graduate University of Advanced Studies in Japan is working on a new technology which could automatically sense when you’re busy working on a PC, and block notifications.

The researchers monitored how busy a user is by monitoring the keyboard activity. The greater the activity, the busier the user is – and when so is the case, this new technology automatically blocks any notifications. The technology was tested on a number of volunteers and so far, has returned 80% accuracy.

The plan is to implement other ‘measurements’ to check out a user’s activity. For instance, even when you’re not typing, you may be busy reading something really important on the screen. Researchers intend to include a mechanism in this technology to determine when a user is intently looking into the screen so as not to mistake lack of keyboard activity for idleness.

Salman Latif
Categories: Computers
Tags: software