Earcon for intermittent information in monitoring environments

In this paper we discuss the first of a series of experiments evaluating earcons for critical care environments. We examine peoples ’ ability to monitor earcons conveying systolic and diastolic blood pressure while conducting a distractor task. The results showed that when a beacon is present prior to the earcon, participants ’ judgment of pitch and duration information improved. The results of the study also indicated presence of historical information in the earcon may interfere with participants ’ judgments. However, since participants felt more confident in their recall of previous values when the historical information was present, the results may reflect insufficient training