Switch detector: an activity spotting system for desktop

An average white-collar worker deals with enormous amount of digital information on daily basis. Recently, there has been a growing interest to support their work. However, in order to be really supportive there is a need to know the current activity of the user at all times. In this paper we present a new technique that takes advantage of temporal aspects of user activity behavior to infer when it is most likely that an activity switch is occurring. We then describe "Activity Switch Detector" an interactive switch notification system embodying these ideas, and an extensive user study by ten participants to test the validity of the approach and present its results.