A beautiful alarm beside your hospital bed

In hospitals all over the world, sounds, beeps and other noises constantly tell staff and patients what’s going on. Studies have shown that hospital medical staff can hear up to 700 alarm signals a day. That’s about once every two minutes. But only about 2% of these signals require actual attention or direct action from the staff. This can lead to ‘alarm fatigue’, where alarm desensitization causes staff to not being able to properly react when it’s needed. Patient’s family members are exposed to standard medical information that they don’t understand and cannot interpret. While often no medical action is needed, they understandably contact the nurse when the beeps change. Adding to the problem are the negative influences of this cacophony of alarms and other noise on patients. It can cause stress and sleep-deprivation which in turn inhibits recovery. How do we solve this?

At the Embassy of Health exhibition during Dutch Design Week 2018 in Eindhoven, the TU Delft Critical Alarms Lab (CAL) presents four different prototypes that can help us start to tackle the problem of noise pollution in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). They are the result of a living lab at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, a vital partner of the CAL, and tackle the noise of bedside monitors, of noisy staff and of the patient vital signs monitors. The goal is to further develop and test these prototypes in clinical trials.

Elif Özcan-Vieira, Director of the CAL at the Industrial Design Engineering Faculty of TU Delft: “It’s called the Silent Intensive Care Unit. ICUs are acoustically hostile environments to accommodate both a smooth workflow for doctors and nurses and support a patient’s health.” The CAL looked at ways to filter unwanted sounds and non-actionable alarms in an ICU, or at how to increase sleep quality for patients while all these monitors and alarms are sounding off. Elif’s favorite prototype in this project might be CareTunes. This graduation project takes raw data of three vital signs of a patient that are always monitored in an ICU: heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen saturation. Using music theory, these vitals are translated into music. “By offering musical updates to the nurses, the continuous measurement of vital signs does not create such a distraction and has a new meaning. Sudden changes in vital signs are easily recognized by nurses and doctors by creating disturbance in music such as faster tempo or musical dissonance. We’ve already presented CareTunes at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore (US) and people can also experience it at the Dutch Design Week 2018 in Eindhoven.”