# Voice Communication Systems Impact on Navigating Officers
## 6 Discussion and Conclusions  
The incoming voice call requires from the OOW to answer the call immediately. Only after answering the call, the OOW may determine its importance. Depending on the nature and the course of the conversation, OOW decides on the future course of action during or after the call (e.g., gathering, processing, forwarding or sharing information, actions on a specific ship's system, log keeping and other). Furthermore, if the OOW was already conducting a certain procedure, by answering the call the procedure would be interrupted. After the interruption the procedure may be continued or started all over, depending mostly on its complexity and the officer's competences. The first research question was _\"To what extent does the voice communication on a navigational bridge influence the workload of an OOW?\"_ The research has shown that, considering all four types of communication systems, it can be roughly estimated that during one watch an OOW has to answer 14 different incoming calls, which last, altogether, 16.19 min, or in other words, 6.7% of watch keeping time. Taking into consideration the main findings and nature of calls it is not surprising that seafarers experience 45% of all incoming calls as distracting, i.e., unnecessarily interrupting a previously started procedure. This issue is particularly important in demanding situations in navigation, such as collision avoidance, navigation in dense traffic or in restricted areas, course change on a waypoint, distress or urgency message receipt or similar. Some demanding situations during navigation, such as collision avoidance or course change on a waypoint, can last for several minutes. During these actions, one low-priority call distracting an officer from 1 to 3 min can significantly reduce their situational awareness. Furthermore, new satellite communication systems have constantly been developing and the existing ones have been improving, making the global communication more reliable and affordable. Similarly, terrestrial mobile system networks have constantly been expanding by building new and more powerful signal antennae. On the other hand, by introducing new, complex ship systems with a high level of automation, a global tendency to reduce the ship's crew size arises. Considering all the above, it is justified to assume that the external calls from the shore will be more frequent and will probably last longer in the future. The second research question was \"In which manner may distractions, activated by incoming voice calls, be reduced?\"  
One of the possible approaches to the problem is to develop and implement the proposed advanced call management system. Such a call management system would allow the caller to decide whether the nature of the call is of higher or lower priority. Consequently, depending on the priority, call notification on the bridge would be different (in type, volume and duration) as well as further actions in case the OOW cannot answer. The main advantage of such a system is that an OOW would know the call priority before answering it and interrupting the previously started procedure. Hence, the OOW could manage their workload by deciding which further actions to take, depending on the complexity of the ongoing navigation situation. The main drawbacks refer to the requirement for a certain level of training and familiarization with a particular call management system and to the introduction of new, different sounds (alerts) on the bridge, which the OOW would have to recognize. Based on all these findings, further research on workload, induced by different aspects of communication, will be necessary, particularly for finding the appropriate solution to prevent unnecessary distractions. **Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, L.M. (Lovro Maglic) and S.V. ; methodology, L.M. (Lovro Maglic), S.V., A.G. and L.M. ([PERSON]); software, L.M. (Lovro Maglic) and S.V. ; validation, L.M. (Lovro Maglic) and S.V. ; formal analysis, L.M. (Lovro Maglic), S.V., A.G. and L.M. ([PERSON]); investigation, L.M.