Multimodal Human-Computer Interfaces for Incident Handling in Metropolitan Transport Management Centre

Efficient road traffic incident management in metropolitan areas is crucial for the smooth traffic flow and the mobility and safety of community. Traffic incident management requires fast and accurate collection and retrieval of critical data, such as incident conditions, and contact information for the intervention crew, public safety organisations and other resources. Access to critical data by traffic control operators can be facilitated through various human-computer interfaces. This paper describes the judicious introduction of a multi-modal interaction paradigm to the user interfaces for incident handling in a metropolitan transport management centre. Prototypes supporting speech and gestural interaction have been built based on user-centred design methodology and their evaluations have been conducted through user studies. The presented innovative user interfaces provide traffic control operators with intuitive, cognitively efficient ways to record traffic incident conditions, facilitate fast retrieval of contact details, and support time-critical incident handling