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

Abstract

Objective A study of auditory displays for simulated patient monitoring compared the effectiveness of two sound categories (alarm sounds indicating general risk categories from international alarm standard IEC 60601-1-8 versus event-specific sounds according to the type of nursing unit) and two configurations (single-patient alarms versus multi-patient sequences). Background Fieldwork in speciality-focused high dependency units (HDU) indicated that auditory alarms are ambiguous and do not identify which patient has a problem. We tested whether participants perform better using auditory displays that identify the relevant patient and problem. Method During simulated patient monitoring of four patients in a respiratory HDU, 60 non-clinicians heard either (a) IEC risk categories as single-patient alarm sounds, (b) event-specific categories as single-patient alarm sounds, (c) IEC risk categories in multi-patient spearcon sequences or (d) event-specific categories in multi-patient spearcon sequences. Participants performed a perceptual-motor task while monitoring patients; after detecting abnormal events, they identified the patient and the event. Results Participants hearing multi-patient sequences made fewer wrong patient identifications than participants hearing single-patient alarms. Advantages of event-specific categories emerged when IEC risk category sounds indicated more than one potential event. Even when IEC and event-specific sounds indicated the same unique event, spearcons supported better event identification than did auditory icon sounds. Conclusion Auditory displays that unambiguously convey which patient is having what problem dramatically improve monitoring performance in a preclinical HDU simulation. Application Time-compressed speech assists development of detailed risk categories needed in specific HDU contexts, and multi-patient sound sequences allow multiple patient wellbeing to be monitored.

Auditory Icons, Earcons, Spearcons, and Speech: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Brief Audio Alerts in Human-Machine Interfaces

“…In this regard, both Edworthy and colleagues and Sanderson and colleagues have offered exemplary models in their work on auditory alerts in medical settings. These research programs have performed preliminary field work (Deschamps & Sanderson, 2021;Kristensen et al, 2015) and tested alerts against background noise (Bennett et al, 2019;Bruder et al, 2022), during multitasking (Bruder et al, 2022;Davidson et al, 2019;Deschamps et al, 2022;Knight et al, 2020) , and in the presence of simultaneous auditory alerts (Edworthy et al, 2022), with evaluation research sampling from the target listener end-user populations (Atyeo & Sanderson, 2015;Wright et al, 2020). Sustained, programmatic research programs like these can ensure the successful design of auditory alerts.…”

Attention capture by own name decreases with speech compression

“…relatives of patients), in order to avoid unnecessary stress or anxiety. Time-compressed speech has also been found to better than medical alarms in supporting multiple-patient monitoring (Deschamps et al, 2022 ).…”