Brief Summary

The article focuses on the auditory component of alarm signals in a medical environment. The authors present the problem with auditory alarm signals in the current medical environment and discuss possible solutions. The article begins with a discussion of the auditory sense as a warning signal and why auditory alarms are important but tend to be misused. Most are not designed well acoustically and do not convey meaningful information. This leads to the user ignoring alarms or turning them off thus making them ineffective. The frequency of auditory alarms is also concerning. There are a lot of them and can become annoying and tend to interfere with tasks than helping with them. The article categorizes technical problems with alarms into four areas: Alarm handling, false alarms, alarm system design and relationship between alarm sounds and their functions. Alarm handling refers to how alarms are prioritized or lack of prioritization. Low priority signals where immediate operator action is not required to prevent an adverse outcome. Due to lack of prioritization of alarms, the operator is overwhelmed with low priority signals and may miss a potentially high priority alarm event due to being annoyed, overworked and desensitized. These types of alarms need not have an auditory component to alert th