Best of Both Worlds

Effective communication is critical to successfully carrying out a task, especially in military operations. Real-time planning, coordination, and directives must be transmitted to operators in order to properly execute their mission. To improve our warfighter’s communication effectiveness, researchers in the Air Force Research Laboratory have developed a network-centric multi-modal communication monitoring suite. Past studies have shown an advantage of this tool compared to traditional radio and chat tools. However studies have also shown that multimodal displays do not always outperform single modality displays, especially in multi-tasking environments. This study evaluated the effectiveness of the Air Force developed multimodal communication suite compared to radio and chat only displays during a multi-tasking communication monitoring and compensatory tracking task. Results indicated that the multimodal display offers the best of both worlds, in that access to the suite provided superior performance to the radio display for communication monitoring and to the chat display for the tracking task. This evaluation aids in the testing and development of the newly developed multimodal communication management suite.