In hospitals, clinicians are presented with varied and disorganized alarm sounds from disparate devices. While there has been attention to reducing inactionable alarms to address alarm overload, little effort has been focused on organizing, simplifying, or improving the informativeness of alarms. In this article, we sought to elicit nurses' tacit interpretation of alarm events to create an organizational structure to inform the design of advanced alarm sounds or integrated alert systems. We used open card sorting to evaluate nurses' perception of the relatedness of different alarm events. A total of 70 hospital nurses sorted 89 alarm events into groups they believed could or should be indicated by the same sound. We conducted a factor analysis on a similarity matrix of the frequency of alarm event pairings to interpret how strongly alarm events loaded on different alarm groups (factors). We interpreted participants' grouping rationale from their group labels and comments. The urgency of response was the most common grouping rationale. Participants also grouped monitoring-related events, device-related events, and events related to calls and patients. Our findings support the standardization and integration of alarm sounds across devices toward a simpler and more informative hospital alarm environment.

中文翻译：

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在医院组织声音警报声：卡片分类研究


在医院里，临床医生会听到来自不同设备的各种杂乱的警报声音。虽然人们已经注意到减少不可操作的警报以解决警报过载问题，但很少有人致力于组织、简化或提高警报的信息量。在本文中，我们试图引出护士对警报事件的默认解释，以创建一个组织结构，为高级警报声音或集成警报系统的设计提供信息。我们使用开放式卡片分类来评估护士对不同警报事件相关性的看法。总共 70 名医院护士将 89 个警报事件分类为他们认为可以或应该由相同声音指示的组。我们对警报事件配对频率的相似矩阵进行了因子分析，以解释警报事件在不同警报组（因子）上的加载程度。我们从参与者的组标签和评论中解释了他们的分组理由。响应的紧迫性是最常见的分组理由。参与者还对与监控相关的事件、与设备相关的事件以及与呼叫和患者相关的事件进行了分组。我们的研究结果支持跨设备报警声音的标准化和集成，以实现更简单、信息更丰富的医院报警环境。