Abstract
Fidgeting, while primarily recognized as a distinguishing characteristic of neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism or ADHD, has also recently been recognized as a potential focus and attention aid for learning in traditional classroom environments. Everyone fidgets to greater or lesser extents, perhaps everyone can benefit from fidgeting aids to refocus attention. The recent explosion in popularity of fidgeting aids, such as fidget spinners, fidget cubes, and other toys highlights the broad appeal of these objects. Human-Computer Interaction researchers have taken an interest in the contributions of fidgeting to productivity. While these works connect the concepts of visual and motor stimulus as meaningful fidgets, little investigation has been done as to the potential contributions of haptic stimulus in digital fidgets. We designed and tested haptic mobile fidgets and compared their effects on task performance and user preference against the traditional spinner and no fidget apparatus.
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Acknowledgments
The research team would like to thank all the Autistic and Neurodivergent folks who supported this project in its early days of conception. Your messages of support and feedback were of great value. The first author would especially like to express gratitude to the research team for supporting this work of auto(autie)ethnography.
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Williams, A., Posadas, B., Prioleau, D., Laurenceau, I., Gilbert, J.E. (2019). User Perceptions of Haptic Fidgets on Mobile Devices for Attention and Task Performance. In: Di Bucchianico, G. (eds) Advances in Design for Inclusion. AHFE 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 776. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94622-1_2
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