Requirements for navigation through drawings on wearable computers by using speech commands

Wearable computers will strongly impact the work on a construction site in the near future. These computers are firstly small in size and secondly the persons using them should not be hampered in doing their basic work by the use of mouse, joystick or even keyboard, which are used as input facilities. Oftentimes the only way to put data in the computer under site conditions, is a speech recognition interface. However, the application of voice as the data input media requires new methods and technologies for the navigation through drawings displayed on a wearable computer on site. This paper describes technologies, methods and algorithms that were introduced to support navigation through a drawing by using speech commands. The context for this problem was given by a project of Carnegie Mellon University and TU - Dresden that focuses on the usage of wearable computers to efficiently measure the progress of a construction project. Being confined to have only a small range of speech commands, it is necessary to optimize the applied command algorithms in a way that the users can navigate to the desired element as quickly as possible.