Voice Communication Systems Impact on Navigating Officers

The tasks of an officer of the watch (OOW) on complex ships during navigation in coastal areas may be very challenging. Almost all the tasks require substantial information processing and timely decision making. Every distracting element should be avoided during navigation. Every call, made through any communication system, activates a new process that the OOW needs to conduct. The new process may interrupt a previously started task. In case of too many incoming calls, the workload of the OOW may increase significantly, thus, their situational awareness may be compromised and the risk of errors may increase. The objective of this research was to analyze the impact of incoming voice calls on the OOW. The research methods used include a questionnaire survey and a series of interviews with experienced officers. The main outcomes refer to the average frequency of incoming calls, duration of conversations and subjective assessment of their influence. The results indicate that, during one watch, an officer needs to answer 14 calls that last 16.19 min altogether. However, the officers consider 45% of calls made during watch keeping as distracting. A possible call management system with the aim to reduce distractions made by low priority calls is proposed in this paper.