Department of Anesthesiology, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, 1211 21st Avenue South, Medical Arts Building, Suite 422, Nashville, TN, 37212, USA.
Department of Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University, 460 Medical Center Drive, Suite 526, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA.
J Med Syst. 2021 Nov 23;46(1):5. doi: 10.1007/s10916-021-01794-9.
In high-consequence industries such as health care, auditory alarms are an important aspect of an informatics system that monitors patients and alerts providers attending to multiple concurrent tasks. Alarms levels are unnecessarily high and alarm signals are uninformative. In a laboratory-based task setting, we studied 25 anesthesiology residents' responses to auditory alarms in a multitasking paradigm comprised of three tasks: patient monitoring, speech perception/intelligibility, and visual vigilance. These tasks were in the presence of background noise plus/minus music, which served as an attention-diverting stimulus. Alarms signified clinical decompensation and were either conventional alarms or a novel informative auditory icon alarm. Both alarms were presented at four different levels. Task performance (accuracy and response times) were analyzed using logistic and linear mixed-effects regression. Salient findings were 1), the icon alarm had similar performance to the conventional alarm at a +2 dB signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) (accuracy: OR 1.21 (95% CI 0.88, 1.67), response time: 0.04 s at 2 dB (95% CI: -0.16, 0.24), which is a much lower level than current clinical environments; 2) the icon alarm was associated with 27% greater odds (95% CI: 18%, 37%) of correctly addressing the vigilance task, regardless of alarm SNR, suggesting crossmodal/multisensory multitasking benefits; and 3) compared to the conventional alarm, the icon alarm was associated with an absolute improvement in speech perception of 4% in the presence of an attention-diverting auditory stimulus (p = 0.031). These findings suggest that auditory icons can provide multitasking benefits in cognitively demanding clinical environments.
在医疗等高风险行业，听觉警报是监测患者并向同时处理多项任务的医护人员发出警报的信息系统的一个重要组成部分。目前的警报设置存在水平过高且信号缺乏信息量的问题。在一个基于实验室的任务环境中，我们研究了 25 名麻醉科住院医师在由三项任务组成的多任务范式中对听觉警报的反应：患者监测、言语感知/可理解性和视觉警戒。这些任务在存在背景噪声加/减音乐的情况下进行，音乐是一种分散注意力的刺激。警报表示临床失代偿，有常规警报和新颖的信息性听觉图标警报两种。两种警报都设置了四个不同的水平。使用逻辑回归和线性混合效应回归分析任务表现（准确性和响应时间）。主要发现有：1）图标警报在+2 分贝信噪比（SNR）时与常规警报的性能相似（准确性：比值比 1.21（95%置信区间 0.88, 1.67），响应时间：2 分贝时为 0.04 秒（95%置信区间：-0.16, 0.24），这比当前的临床环境低得多；2）图标警报与 27%更高的几率（95%置信区间：18%, 37%）相关，无论警报 SNR 如何，都能正确处理警戒任务，这表明跨模态/多感官多任务的好处；3）与常规警报相比，图标警报在存在分散注意力的听觉刺激时，言语感知的绝对改善提高了 4%（p=0.031）。这些发现表明，听觉图标可以在认知要求高的临床环境中提供多任务优势。
