Novel sonification and haptic displays of physiologic variables to improve patient safety

Auditory medical alarms in healthcare are uninformative, poorly localizable, have a low positive predictive value, and are set at thresholds forcing practitioners to be reactive instead of proactive. Sonifying patient physiology as it transitions from normal to abnormal will allow practitioners to respond before the patient status devolves into an emergency. Multimodal interactions have the potential to enhance future sonification tools by reducing alarm fatigue—the addition of haptic cuing to novel physiologic sonification may improve patient safety. To increase the overall efficiency of alarm design in healthcare, we propose reducing alarm fatigue by integrating multisensory streams. We present an experiment that characterizes how the integration of tactile and auditory signals affects the speed and accuracy of alarm responses. Participants received multisensory auditory and haptic input while performing a task designed to tax attentional resources mimicking working in the ICU. Our results indicate there is a trend towards increased perception of change of physiologic variables with concordant haptic stimuli and participants are significantly better at determining the direction of change versus the physiologic variable of change. Future directions include simplification of the sonification schemata and increasing information complexity in the haptic modality to utilize multisensory integration.