Facilitating the watchstander´s voice communications task in future Navy operations

Recent human performance research at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD) has shown that increasing the number of concurrent voice communications tasks individual Navy watchstanders must handle is an uncompromising empirical barrier to streamlining crew sizes in future shipboard combat information centers. Subsequent work on this problem at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has resulted in a serialized communications monitoring prototype (U.S. Patent Application Pub. No. US. 2007/0299657) that uses a patented NRL technology known as “pitch synchronous segmentation” (U.S. Patent 5,933,808) to accelerate buffered human speech up to 100% faster than its normal rate without a meaningful decline in intelligibility. In conjunction with this research effort, a series of ongoing human subjects studies at NRL has shown that rate-accelerated, serialized communications monitoring overwhelmingly improves performance measures of attention, comprehension, and effort in comparison to concurrent listening in the same span of time. This paper provides an overview of NRL´s concurrent communications monitoring solution and summarizes the empirical performance questions addressed by, and the outcomes of, the Lab´s associated program of listening studies.