The Impact of Head-Worn Displays on Strategic Alarm Management and Situation Awareness

Abstract

To investigate whether head-worn displays (HWDs) help mobile participants make better alarm management decisions and achieve better situation awareness than alarms alone. Background: Patient alarms occur frequently in hospitals but often do not require clinical intervention. Clinicians may become desensitized to alarms and fail to respond to clinically relevant alarms. HWDs could make patient information continuously accessible, support situation awareness, and help clinicians prioritize alarms. Method: Experiment 1 (n = 76) tested whether nonclinicians monitoring simulated patients benefited from vital sign information continuously displayed on an HWD while they performed a secondary calculation task. Experiment 2 (n = 13) tested, across three separate experimental sessions, how effectively nursing trainees monitored simulated patients' vital signs under three different display conditions while they assessed a simulated patient. Results: In Experiment 1, participants who had access to continuous patient information on an HWD responded to clinically important alarms 25.9% faster and were 6.7 times less likely to miss alarms compared to participants who only heard alarms. In Experiment 2, participants using an HWD answered situation awareness questions 18.9% more accurately overall than when they used alarms only. However, the effect was significant in only two of the three experimental sessions. Conclusion: HWDs may help users maintain continuous awareness of multiple remote processes without affecting their performance on ongoing tasks. Application: The outcomes may apply to contexts where access to continuous streams of information from remote locations is useful, such as patient monitoring or clinical supervision.

Nurse anesthetists’ experiences using smart glasses to monitor patients’ vital signs during anesthesia care: A qualitative study

“…Providing VSs in SG has previously been found to enable increased and maintained focus on ongoing tasks [12,30], and the results of this study supports this. Being given access to all information allow HCPs to make better decisions, for example if an ongoing task needs to be interrupted in favor of a more important event [30]. This is seen as an asset for improved quality of care and improved patient safety [13], and is applicable to anesthesia care as well.…”

“…Information provided in the users' field of view can improve response time and increase attentiveness [31] as well as situation awareness [12,27]. Providing VSs in SG has previously been found to enable increased and maintained focus on ongoing tasks [12,30], and the results of this study supports this. Being given access to all information allow HCPs to make better decisions, for example if an ongoing task needs to be interrupted in favor of a more important event [30].…”

“…The results show that SG increased access to VSs during anesthesia care, regardless of the NA's location. This has been shown earlier in similar [13,27,28], and simulated [29,30] settings, and is now accordingly also experienced by NAs during clinical anesthesia care. Information provided in the users' field of view can improve response time and increase attentiveness [31] as well as situation awareness [12,27].…”

Combating Alarm Fatigue: The Quest for More Accurate and Safer Clinical Monitoring Equipment

“…In the setting of a busy hospital, it is commonplace to hear constant chimes and beeps, each coming from different machines and indicating different "alarm conditions" (Figure 1). It should be more of an expectation that clinicians become desensitized to extraneous stimuli given the constant sensory bombardment coupled with the need for vigilance and differential interpretation of each alarm [25,26]. When further compounded by heavy clinical workloads and long shifts, it becomes a matter of "statistical probability" before a critical alarm is missed [27][28][29].…”

To Beep or Not to Beep? Evaluating Modalities for Multimodal ICU Alarms

“…A recent work by Pascale et al [19] has shown that HMDs can support healthcare professionals maintaining awareness of their patients' health status without affecting their nursing task. Their HMD studies revealed that the participants reacted faster to alarms and answered situation awareness questions more accurately than those in the control condition.…”