Investigating vigilance for auditory, visual, and haptic interfaces in alarm monitoring
Abstract
There are many alarms in healthcare systems that are primarily visual and auditory modalities. Alarms can occur thousands of times a day and can be stressful for clinicians. The overabundance of alarms leads to alarm fatigue. Alarm fatigue is a large patient safety issue as alarms may be silenced or not responded to in a timely manner. Introduction of a new information modality, such as a touchless haptic interface, could mitigate the effects of the vigilance decrement and alarm fatigue because of multiple resource theory and the idea that we have limited cognitive resources. The objective of this work is to investigate the use of a touchless haptic interface in an alarm monitoring vigilance task compared to visual and auditory interfaces. Data was collected on the reaction times of stimuli response to understand cognitive load and the number of correct detections, false positives, and false negatives to understand performance. Participants (N=36) completed a vigilance task in one of the three modality groups where they were asked to identify a stimulus over a 40-minute period. Mixed-effects linear regression models were built to analyze the differences between modalities and blocks. The main finding of this work is that visual interfaces perform best for alarm monitoring compared to auditory and haptic alarms; however, it was also shown that haptic interfaces may have a lower cognitive load compared to auditory interfaces. Therefore, haptic interfaces may be a promising avenue for offsetting information in healthcare alarm monitoring applications.
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- OSU Theses [15752]