Benefits of sonification and haptic displays with physiologic variables to improve patient safety

Alarm fatigue has become an issue for healthcare providers in the intensive care unit (ICU), and may result from desensitization of constant, overbearing alarms. Sonification is an approach that uses non-speech audio to turn data into sounds and convey information. To increase the overall efficiency of medical alarm design and decrease the prevalence of alarm fatigue, we propose advancing alarm sonification by combining auditory and haptic (vibrotactile) stimuli to create a multisensory alarm. Participants completed several trials -- half using multisensory, half using unisensory -- to identify changes in 4 physiological soundscapes: heart rate (drums), blood pressure (piano), blood oxygenation (guitar), and haptic stimuli. We found a significant effect on the identification of the direction of the variable change when delivering a multisensory alarm compared to unisensory. By proving significance for multisensory alarms in their ability to identify variable direction of change, future research for alarm development should focus on incorporating additional sensory stimuli and advanced sonification techniques to complement auditory information.