No abstract

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.

Spearcons (time-compressed speech) may be a viable display for patient monitoring, but the impact of concurrent linguistic tasks on spearcons has not been examined. We tested whether different concurrent linguistic tasks worsen participants’ identification of spearcons. Experiment 1 tested participants’ identification of spearcons representing 2 vital signs of 5 patients while participants did either no concurrent task, reading, or saying linguistic tasks. Experiment 2 tested identification of 48 single patient-monitoring spearcons while participants did no concurrent task, reading, listening, and saying linguistic tasks. In Experiment 1 the saying task worsened participants’ identification of spearcons compared with the other tasks. In Experiment 2, the saying and listening tasks each reduced participants’ accuracy at identifying spearcons, but the reading task did not. Listening had no more effect than the saying task did. Concurrent listening and saying tasks worsen participants’ identification of spearcons, probably due to auditory modality interference in working memory.