Turns out, you’re not the only one who gets alarm fatigue when you’re in a hospital. Hospital workers hear up to 1,000 alarms per shift, but only 15 percent of those in a critical care unit are clinically relevant. This can cause sensory overload in hospital workers that leads them to become desensitized to these annoying beeps, which in turn can lead to missing important alarms. According to the Food and Drug Administration, there were 566 alarm-related deaths between 2005 and 2010.
Fortunately, it looks like there is a solution to this problem. Joseph Schlesinger, an anesthesiologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Michael Schutz, a music cognition researcher at Canada’s McMaster University, have found that altering the timbre of medical alarms can reduce this alarm fatigue while ensuring that no important sounds are missed. Their study determined that using a percussive timbre, like from a xylophone, reduced the perception of alarm annoyance and were no more difficult to identify than current hospital machine beeps.
“These investigations revealed musical timbres can substantially reduce perceived annoyance without harming alarm learnability — offering a helpful step to improving alarm design while avoiding existing issues of excessive alarm sounds among medical devices,” the team said. “As musical instrument sounds reflect centuries of auditory innovation and thousands of hours of individual practice, we believe musically informed alarm design can lead to improved patient monitoring, care and safety.”