Astute: Increased Situational Awareness through Proactive Decision Support and Adaptive Map-Centric User Interfaces

The Astute project is an ongoing European Artemis project that researches methods to improve the effectiveness of embedded and mobile systems. It does so by providing human-machine interfaces (HMIs) that automatically and proactively adapt, based on the sensed environment and user state. One of the implemented demonstrators supports emergency workers during field operations using on-sleeve and tablet-sized mobile devices. Extensive field and usability studies have proved that a geospatial, map-centric user interface (UI)is essential to provide a low-barrier interface that is easy to learn. The integration of context and user-state reasoning enables proactive decision support that makes HMIs smarter and more effective in stressful and critical situations. We argue that the promising results obtained for the emergency domain have great potential to improve the current practice in border control use cases as well.