Maritime Navigation: Characterizing Collaboration in a High-Speed Craft Navigation Activity

Communication is an important factor in teamwork and collaboration in safety-critical systems. Operating a safety-critical system such as a military vessel requires maintaining high levels of safety. In maritime navigation, communication is key and collaboration as a team is paramount for safety during navigation. Characterizing this is essential for training and bridge design purposes. Characterizing requires objective tools in addition to visual observation of the navigational exercise. Eye-trackers can fill this gap. Eye-trackers enable measurement of eye movements and dilation measures of the pupil in real time. This can help locate design issues and assist designing training paradigms. In this study two eye-trackers were used to measure joint vision of two navigator simultaneously. Through data of visual attention communication patterns can be characterized with greater richness than just visual observation. As for this case study, in an simulator at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy in Bergen (Norway), understanding the kind of communication and finding a way to formulate the collaboration will help to characterize communication pattern as a first attempt. This study builds up upon a previous study that improved an off the shelf eye-tracker through hardware additions and software enhancements to accurately measure pupil dilation despite changing ambient light. This study is expected to be a key landmark study that shows the potential of objective tools such as eye-trackers to characterize communication in safety critical systems such as a high-speed navigational environment.