Alarm Design for Medical Devices

Research Theme: Healthcare Design

To assure patient safety, many of today's devices incorporate an alarm system to inform the medical staff about any deviations in the patient status or the treatment process.

Proper alarm design will facilitate staff in delivering adequate and timely care for the patients – especially in demanding work environments like intensive care units or operation theatres.

Motivation

For at least the last 20 years the medical device industry has been failing to deliver adequately designed alarm systems (AS) with their products. Established points of criticism include non consistent, "piecemeal fashion" design, together with high numbers of false-alarms and inadequately designed alarm sounds.

Medical professionals along with patients suffer from these shortcomings, resulting in immediate effects like confusion and noise induced stress. As additional long term effects, the loss of confidence in the reliability of AS often leads to delayed responses ("cry-wolf" effect) and the repeated muting of alarms.

Objectives

  • Identify factors (technical and non-technical) which influence the performanceof AS
  • Systematically assess the importance of these factors in different healthcaresettings
  • Make the resulting knowledge available to device designers to facilitatethe development of improved medical devices

Method

In a series of observational studies, the usage patterns of devices and their AS will be assessed in a representative range of different healthcare settings:

  • Intensive care units
  • Operating theatres
  • Ambulatory-care centres
  • Home use (Peritoneal dialysis)

Quantitative data like basic patient characteristics (sex, age, APACHE-scores) and results from alarm logging will be assessed in conjunction with quantitative data from semi- structured interviews.

Findings

The first study is scheduled for June 2006 in the ICU of Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden.

Acknowledgements

Support for this project was provided by Gambro AB, Stockholm/Sweden.