ArticleBritish journal of anaesthesia2025
Responding to clinical alarms in unfolding simulated clinical scenarios: auditory icons perform better than tonal alarms.
Article in British journal of anaesthesia, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Anesthesia Providers' Perspectives on the Redesigned Philips Acoustic Alarm System: Qualitative Pre- and Postimplementation Study.JMIR human factors · 2026Article
- Clinician Communication and Patient Safety in Pediatrics: A Practical Application of Human-Centered Design for Problem Identification and Analysis.Journal of patient safety · 2025Article
- The future of sound in patient monitoring: a call to action to embrace the evidence and move forward.British journal of anaesthesia · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThe international medical device safety standard IEC 60601-1-8 now recommends use of auditory icon alarms. Auditory icon alarms are alarms that act as metaphors for the problems that they signal. These are compared with traditional tonal alarms.
methodsTwo sets of three auditory alarms were compared, one consisting of auditory icons and one consisting of variants of older tonal alarms. Volunteer participants were required to monitor three clinical scenarios each lasting 4 min with different problems (cardiac, oxygenation, and technical) occurring during each of these scenarios that triggered alarms multiple times. Participants were required to respond to those alarms while performing a separate vigilance task. Participants were taught the alarms before the tasks, learning the alarms either by the name of the problem (Hazard) or the position of the alarms in the sequence of events (Sequence).
resultsParticipants responded more accurately (F=23.48, P<0.05, eta
conclusionsAuditory icons are more effective than tonal alarms. New alarms as indicated by the standard should be adopted by manufacturers wherever possible.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.