The effects of multimodal mobile communications on cooperative team interactions executing distributed tasks

Abstract

Mobile devices are rapidly becoming an indispensible part of our everyday life. Integrated with various embedded sensors and the ability to support on-the-move processing, mobile devices are being investigated as potential tools to support cooperative team interactions and distributed real-time decision making in both military and civilian applications. A driving interest is how a mobile device equipped with multimodal communication capabilities can contribute to the effectiveness and efficiency of real-time, task outcome and performance. In this paper, we investigate the effects of a prototype multimodal collaborative Android application on distributed collaborating partners jointly working on a physical task. The mobile application's implementation supports real-time data dissemination of an active workspace's perspective between distributed operators. The prototype application was demonstrated in a scenario where teammates utilize different features of the software to collaboratively assemble a complex structure. Results indicated significant improvements in completion times when users visually shared their perspectives and were able to utilize image annotation versus relying on verbal descriptors. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.