AttenTrack: Mobile User Attention Awareness Based on Context and External Distractions

In the mobile internet era, managing limited attention amid information overload is crucial for enhancing collaboration and information delivery. However, current attention-aware systems often depend on wearables or personalized data, limiting their scalability and cross-context adaptability. Inspired by psychological theories, we attempt to treat mobile notifications as naturally occurring external distractions and infer users' attention states based on their response behaviors and contextual information. Our goal is to build an attention-aware model that does not rely on personalized historical data or complex subjective input, while ensuring strong cold-start capability and cross-context adaptability. To this end, We design a field study framework integrating subjective and objective data, closely aligned with real-world external distractions (i.e., mobile notifications). Through field studies, we construct a fine-grained and interpretable dataset centered on the relationship among current context - external distractions - subjective attention. Through our field studies, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the relationships among users' response behaviors, response motivations, contextual information, and attention states. Building on our findings, we propose AttenTrack, a lightweight, privacy-friendly attention awareness model with strong cold-start capability. The model relies solely on non-privacy-sensitive objective data available on mobile devices, and can be applied to a variety of attention management tasks. In addition, we will publicly release the constructed dataset to support future research and advance the field of mobile attention awareness.