7th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare

Research Article

PVT-Touch: Adapting a Reaction Time Test for Touchscreen Devices

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/icst.pervasivehealth.2013.252078,
        author={Matthew Kay and Kyle Rector and Sunny Consolvo and Ben Greenstein and Jacob Wobbrock and Nathaniel Watson and Julie Kientz},
        title={PVT-Touch: Adapting a Reaction Time Test for Touchscreen Devices},
        proceedings={7th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={PERVASIVEHEALTH},
        year={2013},
        month={5},
        keywords={reaction time psychomotor vigilance task pvt sleep health assessment health touchscreen personal informatics},
        doi={10.4108/icst.pervasivehealth.2013.252078}
    }
    
  • Matthew Kay
    Kyle Rector
    Sunny Consolvo
    Ben Greenstein
    Jacob Wobbrock
    Nathaniel Watson
    Julie Kientz
    Year: 2013
    PVT-Touch: Adapting a Reaction Time Test for Touchscreen Devices
    PERVASIVEHEALTH
    ICST
    DOI: 10.4108/icst.pervasivehealth.2013.252078
Matthew Kay1,*, Kyle Rector1, Sunny Consolvo1, Ben Greenstein1, Jacob Wobbrock1, Nathaniel Watson1, Julie Kientz1
  • 1: University of Washington
*Contact email: mjskay@uw.edu

Abstract

The Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) is a validated reaction time (RT) test used to assess aspects of sleep loss including alertness and sleepiness. PVT typically requires a physical button to assess RT, which minimizes the effect of execution time (the time taken to perform a gesture) on RT. When translating this application to mobile devices, a touchscreen version is useful for widespread in situ sleepiness assessments to produce more ecologically valid data. We describe the Android-based implementation of a touchscreen version of PVT, called PVT-Touch. In an evaluation (N=20), we compared four different touchscreen input techniques to a physical button: touch down, finger lift, finger tilt, and goal crossing. We found that touch down was comparable to the physical button approach used in traditional PVT in execution time and in several measures associated with sleepiness, and was preferred by most participants. We also found that finger lift may be a more precise but less intuitive measure, which may warrant further study.