HAPTIC: Haptic Anatomical Positioning to Improve Clinical Monitoring

Hospitals are inundated by the sounds of patient monitoring devices and alarms. These are meant to help, yet also create a stressful environment for physicians and patients. To address this issue, we consider the possibility of delivering complementary haptic alarm stimuli via a wearable tactile display. This may reduce the necessity for the plethora of audible alarms in the Intensive Care Unit and Operating Room, potentially decreasing fatigue among clinicians, and improving sleep quality for patients. The study described here sought to determine a suitable anatomical location where such a tactile display could be worn. Although the wrist is an obvious default, based on the success of smartwatches and fitness monitors, wearable devices below the elbow are disallowed in aseptic procedural environments. We hypothesized that haptic perception would be approximately equivalent at the wrist and ankle, and confirmed this experimentally. Thus, for a healthcare setting, we suggest that the ankle is a suitable alternative for the placement of a tactile display

Did You Feel That? Developing Novel Multimodal Alarms for High Consequence Clinical Environments

Hospitals are overwhelmingly filled with sounds produced by alarms and patient monitoring devices. Consequently, these sounds create a fatiguing and stressful environment for both patients and clinicians. As an attempt to attenuate the auditory sensory overload, we propose the use of a multimodal alarm system in operating rooms and intensive care units. Specifically, the system would utilize multisensory integration of the haptic and auditory channels. We hypothesize that combining these two channels in a synchronized fashion, the auditory threshold of perception of participants will be lowered, thus allowing for an overall reduction of volume in hospitals. The results obtained from pilot testing support this hypothesis. We conclude that further investigation of this method can prove useful in reducing the sound exposure level in hospitals as well as personalizing the perception and type of the alarm for clinicians