Maintenance support: case study for a multimodal mobile user interface
Georg Fuchs, Daniel E. Reichart, Heidrun Schumann, Peter Forbrig · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2006
Maintaining and repairing complex technical facilities such as generating plants requires comprehensive knowledge on subsystems, operational and safety procedures by the technician. Upgrades to the facility may mean that knowledge about these becomes outdated, raising the need for documentation at the working site. Today's commonplace availability of mobile devices motivates the use of digital, interactive manuals over printed ones. Such applications should provide high-quality illustrations and interaction techniques tailored for specific tasks, while at the same time allow flexible deployment of these components on a multitude of (mobile) hardware platforms. This includes the integration of multimodal interaction facilities like speech recognition into the user interface. To meet these demands, we propose a model-based approach that combines task, object and dialog models to specify platform-independent user interfaces. New concepts like relating tasks to domain objects and dialog views allow us to generate abstract canonical prototypes. Another focus is on the necessary adaptation of visual representations to the platform capabilities to remain effective and adequate, requiring tight coupling of the underlying model, the visualization, and alternative input/output modes. The above aspects have been addressed in a prototype for air-condition unit maintenance, presented on the CeBIT 2005 fair.