Interruptions as multimodal outputs: which are the less disruptive?

This paper describes exploratory studies of interruption modalities and disruptiveness. Five interruption modalities were compared: heat, smell, sound, vibration, and light. Much more notable than the differences between modalities was the differences between people. We found that subjects´ sensitiveness depended on their previous life exposure to the modalities. Individual differences greatly control the effect of interrupting stimuli. We show that is possible to build a multimodal adaptive interruption interface, such interfaces would dynamically select the output interruption modality to use based on its effectiveness on a particular user.