Alarm Sounds Review
Alarm Sounds Review (Final) – December 2018
PLEASE NOTE: The information presented herein (including all audio files) is FINAL and for review and testing only.
<PLEASE BOOKMARK THIS PAGE FOR FUTURE REFERENCE.>
Introduction
The following Alarm Sounds are provided as part of the third Committee Draft (CD3) stage of development of Amendment 2 to IEC 60601-1-8. The closing date is February 1, 2019.
Interested in Testing/Researching the Final Audio Files?
If you are an institution/company that wishes to conduct testing/research on these Final Alarm Sounds, please submit a testing protocol to Dr. Judy Edworthy at: j.edworthy@plymouth.ac.uk as soon as possible. Please be sure to include the following information in your proposal:
- The nature of the test, for example will you be testing learnability, urgency, likeability, reaction time, or some other measure? Will you require participants to listen to the sounds and to make a subjective response, or will you ask participants to do something on hearing the alarms?
- Who will you be testing, and how many participants will you test (approximately)? For example, will you be testing nurses, anesthesiologists, surgeons, patients, or some other participant group (or groups)? And how many participants do you intend to test?
- How will you present the sounds to the participants? For example, will you present them to a group of participants, play them once, many times, or some other regime?
- How do you intend analysing the data? In particular, will you be using descriptive statistics (graphs and tables), inferential statistics (t tests, analysis of variance) or a combination of the two?Will you be able to share your data with us for the purposes of development
Following review of your testing protocol, the alarm sounds will be made available to you for downloading/testing.
Table 1 below contains the information presented in Table G.3 (p.37) of the draft. The sounds conform to the guidance given in Tables G.1 and G.2 of the draft.
| TABLE 1 – CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AUDITORY POINTER | |
| Alarm condition priority | File name of auditory pointer |
| Low | low.wav |
| Medium | medium.wav |
| High | high.wav |
Table 2 below corresponds to Table G.4 (p.38) of the draft.
| TABLE 2 – CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AUDITORY ICON | |||
| Category of the source of the alarm condition | Auditory icon metaphor | Auditory icon description | File name of auditory icon |
| Cardiovascular | ‘Lup-dup’; heartbeat sound | A stylized, square/triangle wave-based 'heartbeat' sound with no discernible frequency. Six PULSES formed from three 2-PULSE ‘lup-dup’ sequences | cardiovascular.wav |
| Artificial perfusion | Liquid disturbance, water churning, bubbles | Two approximately 1 s sequences of a strong water bubbling sound, separated by silence | perfusion.wav |
| Ventilation | A single inhale followed by an exhale | A 1 s inhaling sound (like white noise), followed by a 0,5 s gap, followed by a slow exhale with a long tail | ventilation.wav |
| Oxygenation | Irregular, stylized dripping/saturation | Stylized irregular temporal pattern with some discernible pitch; a two-tone sequence superimposed on the six-tone pattern | oxygenation.wav |
| Temperature/energy delivery | Whistling kettle | Complex sound including high frequency harmonics, rising slowly over approximately 2 s | temperature.wav |
| Drug or fluid delivery/administration | Shaking pill bottle | Two 0,8 s sequences of a 4-rattle shaking sound | drug_delivery.wav |
| Equipment or supply failure | Starting up a motor that shuts down suddenly | Spectrally complex sound of a motor revving up (increasing in frequency) over approximately 1,2 s then an abrupt stop tailing off for approximately 0,5 s | failure.wav |
Table 3 below corresponds to Table G.5 (p.39) of the draft.
| Table 3 - CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AUDITORY ALARM SIGNAL | ||
| CATEGORY OF THE SOURCE OF THE ALARM CONDITION | File name of the AUDITORY POINTER plus AUDITORY ICON | |
| CATEGORY OF THE SOURCE OF THE ALARM CONDITION | HIGH PRIORITY | MEDIUM PRIORITY |
| Cardiovascular | MP-cardiovascular.wav | |
| Artificial perfusion | MP-perfusion.wav | |
| Ventilation | MP-ventilation.wav | |
| Oxygenation | MP-oxygenation.wav | |
| Temperature/energy delivery | MP-temperature.wav | |
| Drug or fluid delivery/administration | MP-drug_delivery.wav | |
| Equipment or supply failure | HP-failure.wav | MP-failure.wav |