Feasibility of Estimating Concentration Level for not Disturbing Remote Office Workers Based on Kana-Kanji Conversion Confirmation Time

Aiming at reducing distractions of remote office workers while they are concentrating on their work, this study discusses the feasibility of estimating the concentration level of PC users. In particular, it focuses on the kana-kanji conversion confirmation time. Kana-kanji conversion, which is popular input method for Japanese, requires users to confirm that the converted kanji characters are correct. Since distributed cognition is known to increase reaction time, the confirmation time is expected to be affected by the cognitive resource allocated to the text-input task, i.e. the level of concentration on the task at hand. We conducted a set of experiments with six participants. We instructed them to copy kana text by typing and concurrently convert the given kana text into kanji. We set three conditions; Concentration, Dual-task, and Distraction. In the Dual-task condition, we gave an instruction to the participants to listen to the news and count the names of places mentioned in it while performing the main typing task. The Distraction condition was used in the final experiments that were conducted after lunch and light physical exercise for inducing fatigue and drowsiness. The results suggested that the kana-kanji conversion confirmation time statistically increases when a user is less concentrated on a task because of a subtask or some other distraction.