A formal approach to discovering simultaneous additive masking between auditory medical alarms

Abstract

The failure of humans to respond to auditory medical alarms has resulted in numerous patient injuries and deaths and is thus a major safety concern. A relatively understudied source of response failures has to do with simultaneous masking, a condition where concurrent sounds interact in ways that make one or more of them imperceptible due to physical limitations of human perception. This paper presents a method, which builds on a previous implementation, that uses a novel combination of psychophysical modeling and formal verification with model checking to detect masking in a modeled configuration of medical alarms. Specifically, the new method discussed here improves the original method by adding the ability to detect additive masking while concurrently improving method usability and scalability. This paper describes how these additions to our method were realized. It then demonstrates the scalability and detection improvements via three different case studies. Results and future research are discussed.

Inattentional deafness to auditory alarms: Inter-individual differences, electrophysiological signature and single trial classification

“…These studies provide valuable explanations to conceptualize attentional failures to auditory alarms that have been reported in complex real-life situations (Hasanain et al, 2017). This is particularly true in aviation whereby safety analyses have reported absence of response to auditory alarms as a causing factor to several accidents (Bliss, 2003;Mumaw, 2017).…”

Neural signature of inattentional deafness

“…Audio and video alarms are often used to alert one to an impending hazardous situation. The inability to detect these unexpected warning signals is a safety issue in many domains [Murphy & Greene, ; Dehais et al, ; Hasanain et al, ]. Some theories explain this phenomenon as a result of working memory limitations (a phenomenon called “inattentional amnesia”; c.f.…”

EEG-Engagement Index and Auditory Alarm Misperception: An Inattentional Deafness Study in Actual Flight Condition

“…This is the case for auditory alarm misperception that has been shown to be involved in several aircraft accidents [2,3]. Indeed, the dominant theory to account for this phenomenon is that pilots consciously choose to ignore these warnings due to cognitive biases [4] or poor design issues [5,6]. Without denying the importance of these findings, recent Neuroscientific studies have postulated alternative perceptual and attentional explanations, known as the inattentional deafness hypothesis.…”