Exploration of multimodal alarms for civil aircraft flying task: A laboratory study

Abstract

Owing to the increasing amount of information presented in the cockpit, the visual and hearing channels are unable to adequately transmit information, which may increase the mental load on pilots. This study explores the benefits of multimodal alarms under high and low residual capacities during take-off in civil aircrafts in a quasi-experimental study. The performance of two modes of multimodal (visual and auditory [VA], and visual, auditory, and tactile [VAT]) alarms were tested. The results showed that the VAT alarms were superior to the VA alarms in terms of choice response times (CRTs) when the participants were exposed to low residual capacities of vision and hearing. However, this effect was not observed when the participants had high residual capacities for vision and hearing. Thus, we considered that an additional tactile alarm could play a significant role in the CRTs when VA resources were consumed. There was no significant difference in the number of response errors between the three multimodal alarm modes. This study provides a key comparison of the two modes of multimodal alarms, indicating that VAT alarms are ideal for use in alarm design strategies for next-generation civil cockpits.