Towards improving trust in context-aware systems by displaying system confidence

For automatic or context-aware systems a major issue is user trust, which is to a large extent determined by system reliability. For systems based on sensor input which are inherently uncertain or even uncomplete there is little hope that they will ever be perfectly reliable. In this paper we test the hypothesis if explicitly displaying the current confidence of the system increases the usability of such systems. For the example of a context-aware mobile phone, the experiments show that displaying confidence information increases the user's trust in the system.