Making Alarms More Musical Can Save Lives (scientificamerican.com) 47
Medical alarms don't have to be louder to be more effective. Scientific American: Beeping alarms in hospitals are a life-or-death matter -- but with so many going off all the time, medical professionals may experience alarm fatigue that impairs care. Researchers now report that changing an alarm's sound to incorporate properties of musical instruments can make it more helpful amid the din. Auditory alarms can sound up to 300 times a day per patient in U.S. hospitals, but only a small fraction require immediate action.
Data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration suggest that alarm fatigue (including when clinicians turned off or forgot to restart alarms) and other alarm-related issues were linked to 566 deaths over five and a half years. After a typical day at the hospital, "I'd leave with beeping in my ears," says Vanderbilt University Medical Center anesthesiologist Joseph Schlesinger. He collaborated with Michael Schutz, a music cognition researcher at McMaster University in Ontario, to analyze how musical sounds could improve hospital alarms.
In 2015 Schutz and Schlesinger began examining musical qualities called timbres that might let softer sounds command attention from busy clinicians. They found that sounds with a "percussive" timbre, many of which contain short bursts of high-frequency energy -- such as wineglasses clinking -- stand out even at low volume. In contrast, loud, "flat" tones that lack high-frequency components, like a reversing truck's beep, get lost. The researchers have since conducted experiments in which participants evaluate different sounds and melodies for annoyance, detectability and recognizability. For a recent study detailed in Perioperative Care and Operating Room Management, the researchers played participants the same sequences of notes with varying timbres. They found the sounds that made these sequences least annoying, with no decrease in recall, were percussive and had complex, time-varied harmonic overtones (the many components within a single sound) like a xylophone's ping, rather than a few homogeneous ones like monotonous mechanical beeps.
Data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration suggest that alarm fatigue (including when clinicians turned off or forgot to restart alarms) and other alarm-related issues were linked to 566 deaths over five and a half years. After a typical day at the hospital, "I'd leave with beeping in my ears," says Vanderbilt University Medical Center anesthesiologist Joseph Schlesinger. He collaborated with Michael Schutz, a music cognition researcher at McMaster University in Ontario, to analyze how musical sounds could improve hospital alarms.
In 2015 Schutz and Schlesinger began examining musical qualities called timbres that might let softer sounds command attention from busy clinicians. They found that sounds with a "percussive" timbre, many of which contain short bursts of high-frequency energy -- such as wineglasses clinking -- stand out even at low volume. In contrast, loud, "flat" tones that lack high-frequency components, like a reversing truck's beep, get lost. The researchers have since conducted experiments in which participants evaluate different sounds and melodies for annoyance, detectability and recognizability. For a recent study detailed in Perioperative Care and Operating Room Management, the researchers played participants the same sequences of notes with varying timbres. They found the sounds that made these sequences least annoying, with no decrease in recall, were percussive and had complex, time-varied harmonic overtones (the many components within a single sound) like a xylophone's ping, rather than a few homogeneous ones like monotonous mechanical beeps.
To the tune of "Another one bites the dust" (Score:3)
Sure a nice tune would be more pleasant than beeeep beeeeep beeeeep.
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The one the nurses really hate is "You dropped a bomb on me".
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Sure a nice tune would be more pleasant than beeeep beeeeep beeeeep.
Even worse is a single beep at 3 am.
You have no idea which device it came from, so you lie awake waiting to see if it beeps again.
You wait and wait, but there is nothing. So you give up and go back to sleep.
Just as you doze off: beeeep.
Re:To the tune of "Another one bites the dust" (Score:5, Interesting)
Fun fact: most houses dip in temperature around 4am - batteries are just slightly less reactive in the cold so your smoke alarm will first dip below critical voltage then and CHIRP!
Not just Murphy's Law this time.
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I switched to lithium batteries for smoke detectors a few years ago, they last for years, maybe even the useful life of the detector.
https://energizer.com/batterie... [energizer.com]
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This [youtube.com] (particularly the marimba part, my favorite)
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The most popular will be "I want to be sedated", by the Ramones.
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Look, somebody has been working on it! (Score:2)
From a few years back:
https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c4hnA8jXwo (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
That needs to be the one for after death is pronounced.
Other ideas that come to mind are:
* "You dropped a bomb on me" when a bedpan needs to be changed.
*"Another one bites the dust" when CPR is in progress.
*"Yours is an Empty Hope" by Nightwish for asystole.
*" https://youtu.be/SlEfVukAPqs?s... [youtu.be] " "Refill" by Elle Varner with a loop of the chorus for an empty IV bag.
*"Hurt" by Johnny Cash for pain medication requests.
We could go on all day.
This is what Toyota learned (Score:5, Informative)
Re: This is what Toyota learned (Score:2)
...and in Particle Physics (Score:4, Interesting)
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The Japanese have adopted this technique for all sorts of things. ATMs often play little tunes when they dispense money, for example. It might only be a few notes, but it's not a basic beep beep beep.
At train stations they have tunes that play to warn you when the doors are closing, and every station has a different one.
They also have audio cues for people with limited vision. Sometimes it's a basic "bing bong" doorbell type noise, emanating from a speaker near the exit, but some newer stations also have wh
LG appliances (Score:2)
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Aye, my new Samsung washing machine plays a rather long tune when it finishes. I didn't get the WiFi version for obvious reasons, but I think I might be able to detect the end of wash tune with a microcontroller and MEMS microphone.
Ferris Bueller "Chic-Chic-a-chic-kaw" (Score:2)
I use the "Chic-Chic-a-chic-kaw" bit from the song Oh Yeah by Yello as my message notification tone.
* Easy to hear at low volume from a distance (through tinnitus). Surprisingly long distance (high tones with a smidge of beat)
* Even if I don't hear it, others will and mention it.
* Funny accidental conversation starter (if one is into that sort of thing)
I tried one with the "Bueller" by Ben Stein (8 seconds long with the word repeated a second time), but that got annoying.
Pink Floyd's "Money" (Score:3)
My wife is a free lance sign language interpreter. Her ring tone for agencies that give her work is the first 30 seconds of Pink Floyd's "Money".
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Downloading now ... ... ...
Annoying music (Score:2)
Something people will want to put a stop to.
Anything by Nickelback comes to mind.
Why not (Score:3)
Why not just do away with useless alarms?
Re:Why not (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not just do away with useless alarms?
This was one of the lessons from the Three Mile Island [wikipedia.org] accident.
To make it "extra safe", all the equipment was designed to alert the operators if there were any problems or anomalies, if something needed to be checked, or if data needed to be collected.
Alarms and buzzers went off dozens of times a day. The operators learned to ignore them and taped muffling over the speakers in some parts of the plant.
Then, when a real problem happened, it was just another alarm and was ignored.
Re: Why not (Score:2)
Seems like a major limitation (Score:2)
I donâ(TM)t doubt that novel musical tones got better response that that-spurious-out-of-range-alarm-thatâ(TM)s-never-worth-checking; but would that remain the case if you started hammering people with spurious musical alarms?
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Somebody hates these cans! (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem isn't the specific noise that the alarm makes, it's summed up in the article itself.
"Auditory alarms can sound up to 300 times a day per patient in U.S. hospitals, but only a small fraction require immediate action."
When everything is built to try to notify everyone of everything all the time, well, yeah people are going to start ignoring them. That makes perfect sense. And you can't fault someone for ignoring the one notification that actually meant something amongst the billion that meant nothing.
And as soon as they figure out the optimal sound to actually get someone's attention, every other alarm will immediately copy it.
How about some regulations around when alarms and notifications in general can be used? I feel like I'm under a constant barrage of notification harassment from literally every company out there, and I don't even work in a hospital.
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The problem isn't the specific noise that the alarm makes, it's summed up in the article itself.
"Auditory alarms can sound up to 300 times a day per patient in U.S. hospitals, but only a small fraction require immediate action."
That caught my eye as well, and it strikes me as gross exaggeration - that's more often than every 5 minutes for each patient. That's almost guaranteed to be a broken piece of equipment, and that would be hauled away pretty quickly because nurses won't put up with that kind of constant interruption. I've spent more than my share of time confined to a hospital bed, and I honestly don't recall many alarms that didn't legitimately call for immediate action. IV line blocked? Probably don't want to let that wait
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Not just hospitals. People tend to ignore most alarms outside, because there's always some shoplifting siren going off, or a car reversing, or some other thing they don't care about.
Take a queue from game design (Score:1)
Good games have a nice balance between background music and noises and things that should draw your attention in a certain way. Iâ(TM)ve got my Prometheus alerts at work with a little Python script to play different game sounds depending on severity and job whether I should pay more or less attention to it. From Minecraft, Doom, Half Life and Among Us, plenty of good recognizable sounds that remind you whether you should answer, avoid or purely informational.
Boss Fight (Score:2)
It's all fun and games 'til the boss fight music starts.
Ever been on a big construction site? (Score:3)
Back up alarms were supposed to make the jobsite safer
With lots of trucks and forklifts, alarms are constant
It becomes part of the background noise and is tuned out
What about patients? (Score:3)
All of the beeping and alarms can make life a living hell for patients in the hospital. Any that aren't in a coma are going to be severely sleep deprived from the constant din (in addition to being woken up several times a night for rounds).
Seems like there has to be a better solution that just making the alarms more noticeable.
Car Factories (Score:2)
Car factories have been using musical error codes for decades. The reason is that you can't always see the big error status boards from everywhere in the factory, and you can't hear voice announcements over the general noise. To this day I'm pretty sure the PLCs use MIDI files, though I think they can do MP3s as well.
70's Tech (Score:2)
Hey, it's 2024, we can have software supervise irregular patterns and use legit TTS to talk to nurses.
Yeah, everybody is trained on nonstop sine wave beeps, but only because that's what was available fifty years ago.
Nothing wrong with also having a switch to turn on a monitor speaker for diligent observation but the overnight orchestra of beeping gear just becomes background noise with only tempo for aural information.
Mentally taxing and just not a necessary limitation anymore.
Good, now do fast food (Score:2)
On those rare occasions when I dine in at fast food restaurants, I sit as far away from the counter as possible so I don't have to hear beeps. I feel sorry for anybody who has to work with that. I'm assuming of course that it won't all just go away and be replaced by robots... but the 'bots will probably beep at their tenders unless they wise up to this.
Reminds me of Star Trek Voyager episode (Score:3)
Message in a Bottle is an episode where the two EMH characters manage to place themselves on the bridge of a Federation ship that is under attack. They are alone, trying to figure out how to run things, when they start hearing beeping sounds. It's one of the best comedies in a series that can be dry at times. I wish I could find a link to a video clip, but this is the best I could do.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.co... [fandom.com]
It's not just the tones, the alarms are too dumb (Score:3)
Those things go off for all kinds of reasons that should not warrant an alarm. This only adds to the alarm fatigue, making it more likely that the one-in-100 truly serious alarm will be overlooked.
This is the same situation, though typically not as dangerous, when it comes to all kinds of software error logs. Too much noise, not enough substance.
Enjoy alarm too much! (Score:3)
I use the musical alarms for various things too. One problem is that sometimes one will sound and I pause and want to listen to the music and let it finish. Wait, what was that alarm for?
Metroid (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Bells? (Score:5, Insightful)
So the best sound for an an alarm is "percussive with complex, time-varied harmonic overtones (the many components within a single sound) like a xylophone's ping". So, a bell then? Which have been used for alerting for centuries.