Overview

Remote meetings have become an essential part of modern work but often lead to sustained mental workload and fatigue, negatively impacting productivity and well-being. Taking short breaks can help restore attention and improve performance, yet people rarely initiate breaks on their own.

Interviews have shown that participants typically decide to take breaks only when basic physiological needs arise, such as thirst, hunger, or the urge to use the restroom. This raises an intriguing question:

Can we nudge people into wanting to take a break, without explicitly telling them to?

This seminar explores subtle, implicit triggers, such as scents, sensations of dryness, or warmth, that could influence people’s perception of their physiological state and encourage them to take a break voluntarily.

Goals

The seminar focuses on designing and testing experimental prototypes to investigate whether such implicit triggers can increase self-initiated breaks in remote meeting scenarios. Students will:

• Design low- or high-fidelity prototypes simulating nudges (e.g., scent diffusers, ambient warmth, air dryness).
• Conduct controlled experiments to test the effectiveness of these triggers.
• Collect and analyze qualitative and behavioral data to evaluate their impact.
• Summarize findings in a CHI-style poster paper (up to 6 pages).

Krisam, C., Seitz, J., Knierim, M. T., & Maedche, A. (2025). A Cognitive Load-Adaptive Microbreak Intervention in Video Meeting Systems: First Results from a DSR Project. In F. D. Davis, R. Riedl, J. vom Brocke, P.-M. Léger, A. B. Randolph, & G. R. Müller-Putz (Eds.), Information Systems and Neuroscience (pp. 327–335). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-71385-9_28

Krisam, C., Seitz, J. & Knierim, M. T., (2025). When to Take a Break? Temporal Dynamics of Mental Workload in Remote Meetings – A NeuroIS Study. ICIS 2025 Proceedings. Conditionally Accepted.

Henning, R. A., Sauter, S. L., Salvendy, G., & Krieg, E. F. (1989). Microbreak length, performance, and stress in a data entry task. Ergonomics, 32(7), 855–864. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140138908966848