Objective

In this work, we systematically evaluated the reserved alarm sounds of the IEC 60601-1-8 international medical alarm standard to determine when and how they can be totally and partially masked.

Background

IEC 60601-1-8 gives engineers instruction for creating human-perceivable auditory medical alarms. This includes reserved alarm sounds: common types of alarms where each is a tonal melody. Even when this standard is honored, practitioners still fail to hear alarms, causing practitioner nonresponse and, thus, potential patient harm. Simultaneous masking, a condition where one or more alarms is imperceptible in the presence of other concurrently sounding alarms due to limitations of the human sensory system, is partially responsible for this.

Methods

In this research, we use automated proof techniques to determine if masking can occur in a modeled configuration of medical alarms. This allows us to determine when and how reserved alarm sound can mask other reserved alarms and to explore parameters to address discovered problems.

Results

We report the minimum number of other alarm sounds it takes to both totally and partially mask each of the high-, medium-, and low-priority alarm sounds from the standard.

Conclusions

Significant masking problems were found for both the total and partial masking of high-, medium-, and low-priority reserved alarm sounds.

Application

We show that discovered problems can be mitigated by setting alarm volumes to standard values based on priority level and by randomizing the timing of alarm tones.

中文翻译：

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IEC 60601-1-8 国际医疗警报标准的保留警报声音之间的掩蔽：系统、正式的分析

 客观的

在这项工作中，我们系统地评估了 IEC 60601-1-8 国际医疗警报标准中保留的警报声音，以确定何时以及如何完全或部分屏蔽它们。

 背景

IEC 60601-1-8 为工程师提供了创建人类可感知的听觉医疗警报的指导。这包括保留的警报声音：常见类型的警报，其中每种警报声音都是音调旋律。即使遵守这一标准，医生仍然听不到警报，导致医生无反应，从而对患者造成潜在的伤害。同时屏蔽是一种由于人类感觉系统的限制而在其他同时发出警报的情况下无法察觉一个或多个警报的情况，这是造成这种情况的部分原因。

 方法

在这项研究中，我们使用自动证明技术来确定医疗警报的建模配置中是否可能发生屏蔽。这使我们能够确定保留的警报声音何时以及如何掩盖其他保留的警报，并探索参数来解决发现的问题。

 结果

我们报告了完全和部分屏蔽标准中高、中和低优先级警报声音所需的其他警报声音的最少数量。

 结论

高、中、低优先级保留报警声音的全部和部分掩蔽都发现了严重的掩蔽问题。

 应用

我们表明，可以通过根据优先级将警报音量设置为标准值以及随机化警报音的时间来缓解已发现的问题。