Multimodal user interface for traffic incident management in control room

Efficient road traffic incident management (TIM) in metropolitan areas is crucial for the smooth traffic flow and the mobility and safety of community. TIM 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. The judicious introduction of a multimodal interaction paradigm to the user interfaces (UIs) for incident handling in a metropolitan transport management centre is discussed. Two research prototypes supporting speech and gestural interactions have been developed on the basis of the User Centred Design methodology, and their evaluations have been conducted through user studies. The user studies on the prototypes suggest that multimodal UIs (MMUIs) can 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. The research prototypes described herein represent some initial steps for the longer-term deployment of advanced MMUI systems for emergency management