Work-Life Balance through Tangibles and the Internet of Things

When busy juggling career, family and social demands, it is all too easy to lose sight of the importance of maintaining health and wellbeing through taking breaks from and recovering after work. Given the abundance of attention-grabbing smart devices that notify us at inopportune moments, another mobile app that tells us to stop checking our phones and focus on non-work activities seems counterintuitive. Instead, a separate system such as a tangible user interface (TUI) that acts in the periphery of our attention without aggravating the information overload we are exposed to, could be the way forward. A number of TUI interventions have been designed but there is a woeful lack of evaluative research investigating the efficacy and user experience of such concepts.