Auditory alarms in hospitals are ambiguous and do not provide enough information to support doctors and nurses’ awareness of patient events. A potential alternative is the use of short segments of time-compressed speech, or spearcons. However, sometimes it might be desirable for patients to understand spearcons and sometimes not. We used reverse hierarchy theory to hypothesize that there will be a degree of compression where spearcons are intelligible for trained listeners but not for untrained listeners. In Experiment 1, spearcons were compressed to either 20% or 25% of their original duration. Their intelligibility was very high for trained participants, but also quite high for untrained participants. In Experiment 2 each word within each spearcon was compressed to a different degree based on the results of Experiment 1. This technique was effective in creating the desired difference in spearcon intelligibility between trained and untrained listeners. An implication of these results is that manipulating the degree of compression of spearcons “by word” can increase the effect of training so that untrained listeners reliably do not understand the content of the spearcons.

Clinicians are not always at their patients’ bedsides and may therefore need ways of remotely monitoring the well-being of multiple patients under their care. We outline the main findings of a research program investigating whether the intermittent presentation of short phrases of time-compressed speech (spearcons) is an effective way of giving mobile clinicians information about their patients without annoying either clinician or patient. We provide a high-level overview of several studies investigating participants’ ability to understand spearcons, both individually and in sequences representing multiple patients. We then report in more detail a recent small study testing whether participants’ ability to understand spearcons is compromised by different kinds of ongoing tasks. Finally, we outline further issues that should be addressed and further research studies performed before spearcons could be considered a viable tool for patient monitoring.