A Psychoacoustic Sound Design for Pulse Oximetry

Abstract

Oxygen saturation monitoring of neonates is a demanding task, as oxygen saturation (SpO2) has to be maintained in a particular range. However, auditory displays of conventional pulse oximeters are not suitable for informing a clinician about deviations from a target range. A psychoacoustic sonification for neonatal oxygen saturation monitoring is presented. It consists of a continuous Shepard tone at its core. In a laboratory study it was tested if participants (N = 6) could differentiate between seven ranges of oxygen saturation using the proposed sonification. On average participants could identify in 84% of all cases the correct SpO2 range. Moreover, detection rates differed significantly between the seven ranges and as a function of the magnitude of SpO2 change between two consecutive values. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed and implications for further improvements of the presented sonification are proposed.

Psychoacoustic Sonification as User Interface for Human-Machine Interaction

“…Psychoacoustic sonification can serve to communicate the state of one or more vital functions in relation to the target value and/or critical thresholds. This has been demonstrated for a pulse-oximetry scenario of neonates [23]. Here, users are able to identify whether the oxygen saturation lies safely within the target region (near 92.5%, near or within the critical region below 90% or above 95%).…”

Investigating the Effect of Polarity in Auditory and Vibrotactile Displays Under Cognitive Load

“…We used the N -back task protocol to induce cognitive load, since data-sound and data-vibration mappings like these are often used in cognitively demanding scenarios, e.g., driving [35,36,41], air traffic control [1,8,9,37], and in hospitals [3,16,31,38]. The Nback task level had an effect on TLX scores and response time; both values were higher in the 2-back task than the 0-back task.…”

The CURAT Sonification Game: Gamification for Remote Sonification Evaluation

“…We have evaluated the two-dimensional psychoacoustic sonification already in a passive [21] and an interactive [10] laboratory experiment with abstract localization and navigation tasks and in the context of pulse oximetry [9].…”

“…Therefore, it is common to evaluate sonification designs in experiments with users. In studies such as, for example, [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12] between 6 and 24 participants are invited to the laboratory for experiments that last several minutes. They interpret and sometimes interact with the sonification.…”