Auditory Sequences Presented With Spearcons Support Better Multiple Patient Monitoring Than Single-Patient Alarms: A...

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Patient Safety

Background:

• Auditory alarms in high dependency units (HDUs) are often ambiguous, failing to identify the specific patient or problem.
• Current alarm systems may not effectively communicate critical patient status information.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the effectiveness of different auditory display configurations and sound categories for simulated patient monitoring.
• To determine if event-specific sounds and multi-patient sequences improve performance compared to general risk categories and single-patient alarms.

Main Methods:

• A simulated patient monitoring task was conducted with 60 non-clinicians in a respiratory HDU setting.
• Participants were exposed to four auditory display conditions: IEC risk categories vs. event-specific sounds, and single-patient alarms vs. multi-patient sequences.
• Performance was assessed by the accuracy of identifying the patient and the event following abnormal event detection.

Main Results:

• Multi-patient sequences led to fewer incorrect patient identifications than single-patient alarms.
• Event-specific sound categories showed advantages when IEC risk categories indicated multiple potential events.
• Speech-based auditory icons (spearcons) outperformed auditory icons for event identification, even for unique events.

Conclusions:

• Auditory displays that clearly indicate the patient and the specific problem significantly enhance monitoring performance in simulated HDU environments.
• The findings support the development of more informative and unambiguous auditory alarm systems for critical care settings.