The Quest to Quiet Hospital Alarms

Alarms at the hospital are getting a tune up.

For years, the cacophony of beeping and buzzing has been not only annoying—preventing patients from getting much needed rest—but potentially hazardous as overwhelmed healthcare professionals tune them out.

Researchers are now making alarms smarter, more useful and less annoying, reports Laura Landro.

At Stanford Medicine’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, monitors were programmed with time delays and conditional triggers so that some readings—like a brief drop in blood-oxygen—didn’t automatically set off an alarm, allowing less critical issues to self-correct. The changes cut the typical number of alarms per patient each day by 75% in the pediatric ICU and by 82% in the cardiac unit, with researchers finding no increase in emergencies.

At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, an anesthesiology professor (and musician) partnered with a music-cognition researcher to create alarms that were easier to distinguish, less irritating and more informative. They focused on recognizable sounds to cue caregivers to what’s happening with a patient—for example, using the familiar “lub-dub” of a heartbeat to indicate blood pressure.

Their system also assigns a “pointer” to sounds—for instance, altering pitch, harmony and texture to signal high or low blood pressure and severity. A study showed participants recognized an urgent high-blood-pressure alarm 10% faster when it used musical cues.

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