Initial Design of a Multimodal Collaborative Mobile Application for Real Time Decision Making

Mobile devices, smartphones and tablets, are continually expanding their computational performance capabilities through improved processing, interconnectivity network abilities, resource management and ease of use user interfaces. As such they are gaining interestas a means tosupport on-the-move remote collaboration for military personnel executing real time decision making tasks. This paper focuses on a software-based implementation of a prototype multimodal Android application that was designed to capture and disseminate real time battlefield perspectives to distributed entities. Moreover the mobile application enables remote experts to interactively collaborate through multimodal functionality to provide directives to the mobile userthat should be applied to the local scene. The design of themobile application interaction is discuss as well as the results from aninitialdemonstration where remote guidance was present to a mobile user attempting to defuse an improvised explosive device. Additionally, we report future implementation capabilities and projected military usage.