Evaluation of Five Interruption Methods for Speech Interaction in Wearable Computing Dual-Task Environments

Because users of wearable computers are often involved in dual-task situations with real-world tasks of a critical nature, interruption handling is a crucial design issue of wearable user interfaces. We present a study evaluating the impact of five interruption methods to determine how interruptions should be handled when speech interaction is available to control an application. The study uses the HotWire apparatus to simulate a primary manual task in a laboratory experiment. Results indicate that speech interaction can compensate for many typical challenges users have to deal with in a dual-task situation and can reduce the impact of an interrupting wearable computer.