Opportunities to Use Speech Recognition for Bridge Inspection

Inspections of bridge mandated by the National Bridge Inventory (NBI) are required to be performed every two years. On an NBI inspection, inspectors go out to the field and collect inspection information based on the requirement of the state owning the bridge. Since the development of mobile computing devices, such as notebook computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and pen computers, many organizations have been trying to deliver computing support for bridge inspectors in the field using these devices in order to improve productivity. However, some bridge inspectors are still using paper- based forms and clipboards during their inspection activity. From our experience with bridge inspectors from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, District 11, the user interface modality as well as the mobility of the hardware have major effects on the usability of such systems. It has been long known that the success or failure of a particular application depends significantly on the way the user interacts with the system. We have studied the use of a wearable computer to provide an unobtrusive hardware platform supporting bridge inspection. This paper specifically discusses the potential use of speech recognition for the bridge inspection application in order to improve the usability of the user interface. The background of speech recognition technology, along with the results of our preliminary study will be discussed in this paper.