Head Mounted Alerting for Urban Operations via Tactical Information Management System

Abstract : The United States military possesses unprecedented tactical alert generation capabilities but could quickly overwhelm a soldier conducting an urban operation with too much information. For this program, the authors investigated the use of a proof of concept Information Management Engine (IME) to allow a soldier to filter the information he receives, via a head mounted presentation system, through an intuitive training process. For the authors' purposes, the pieces of information that are sent to the soldier are referred to as `alerts' and can be in the form of text, audio (speech), imagery, or streaming video. The objective is to provide a "peripheral awareness" capability that presents appropriate information via a head mounted see-around video display and an integrated earphone. Toward this end, the authors developed a prototype Tactical Alert Management System (TAMS) that uses the IME to determine if and how an alert should be presented to the user. The authors then developed a set of experiments to assess the military utility of the TAMS concept. Finally, the authors conducted an after action review and reported the results in this document.