MOSAIC: Measurement of Simultaneous Actions and Integrated Contexts

As multi-tasking demands continue to grow across Navy environments, the potential costs of multi-tasking, such as high workload and degraded situation awareness, could be the difference between mission success or failure. Hence, there is a need to measure and evaluate multi-tasking to identify issues and develop acceptable solutions. However, current approaches typically remain overly specific to a certain paradigm or collection of tasks. Aptima proposes to fill this gap by developing a flexible measurement system that facilitates rigorous evaluations of multi-tasking performance. Relying on a universal, empirically-driven framework of multi-tasking measurement, Aptima"s approach will utilize: (1) libraries of domain-agnostic and domain-specific performance measures; (2) a measure selection tool that adapts the measure libraries appropriately to a given environment; and (3) measurement software that executes the selected measures. As measures are collected, the proposed system will provide evaluators with the necessary data to identify multi-tasking costs, assess the risks associated with those costs, and devise potential mitigation strategies. In addition, Aptima"s solution will be designed to integrate with a range of test beds, while maintaining flexibility to account for future assessment tools that consume the generated multi-tasking data.