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Supporting routine decision-making with a next-generation alarm clock

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Abstract

People make hundreds of decisions every day. Rather than optimize those decisions by gathering pertinent information, people instead rely on routines. While those routines are usually sufficient, they do occasionally fail. Those failures present an opportunity to improve decision-making by providing low-cost information when and where people start to follow their routines. We conducted a study to examine the routines that users follow at night and in the morning. Drawing on the results, we created a next-generation alarm clock that highlights unusual situations to help users determine when and how to modify their routines to more effectively decide on an alarm time, what to wear, when to get out of bed, and when to leave for work.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Microsoft Research for their hardware donation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 801 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Brian M. Landry, Jeffrey S. Pierce & Charles L. Isbell Jr

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  1. Brian M. Landry
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  2. Jeffrey S. Pierce
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  3. Charles L. Isbell Jr
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Correspondence to Brian M. Landry.

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Landry, B.M., Pierce, J.S. & Isbell, C.L. Supporting routine decision-making with a next-generation alarm clock. Pers Ubiquit Comput 8, 154–160 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-004-0274-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-004-0274-y

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