ROGER: Visualizing Voice Records to Enhance Team Communication Trainings for High-Stress Situations

Abstract

Effective communication is essential in high-stress environments but stress often disrupts the flow of information and leads to miscommunication. While scenario-based training exercises are widely used, post-hoc reflection and analysis of verbal interactions remain challenging due to overlapping speech, limited analysis time, and the dynamic nature of these situations. This paper introduces ROGER, a novel visual analytics interface designed to support afteraction reviews of communication during high-stress training scenarios. Developed in collaboration with police trainers through an iterative design study, ROGER integrates emotional voice metrics, heart rate variability, and spoken language content to provide a comprehensive analysis of team communication. The system enables a flexible in-depth exploration of communication patterns through motifs—repeated sequences or content elements—including those generated by a large language model (LLM) as well as predefined ones. Our approach addresses the limitations of existing tools, which focus primarily on content summarization or voice replays without incorporating emotional and stress-related voice data. We validated the utility through interviews with police trainers and conducted a workshop with medical first responders to investigate the potential for cross-domain applicability. Our findings provide preliminary evidence that ROGER supports effective team performance analysis in diverse high-stress environments.

Publication

ROGER: Visualizing Voice Records to Enhance Team Communication Trainings for High-Stress Situations
Proc. Int. Symp. on Visual Information Communication and Interaction (VINCI), 2025
Michael Oppermann, Jakob Uhl, Georg Regal, Manfred Tscheligi, and Markus Murtinger

Tags

ROGER Interface
Fig. 1. ROGER: Interactive visualization and motif-querying interface for analyzing team communication. Center: comm. patterns; Right: conversation log; Top: various controls. Detailed annotations in the screenshot highlight individual components.
VizCommender - Extraction
Fig. 2. Simplified example feature extraction from a Tableau workbook. To illustrate typical features, a highly abbreviated example of the workbook XML is shown in the middle. Highlighted text color indicates the corresponding features that are converted into a numeric vector representation and used to compute text-based similarity. Similar types of text gets extracted from the remaining views and dashboards of the workbook.
VizCommender - Overview
Fig. 3. VizCommender interface that allows users to browse through a VizRepo. Workbook thumbnails are arranged in a grid view. Users can search for content or further drill down by selecting one of the tags at the top. The quick view sidebar on the right provides further details including recommendations when a workbook is selected.
VizCommender - Detail View
Fig. 4. Interface detail view with recommendations. (a) Interactive Tableau workbook; (b) Expanded recommendation panel at the bottom of the screen showing related workbooks; (c) Tab navigation to switch between different recommendation types; (d) Alternative recommendation panel showing workbooks that use similar data