Special Issue "Multimodal Medical Alarms"
A special issue of Multimodal Technologies and Interaction (ISSN 2414-4088).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2018) | Viewed by 26618
Special Issue Editors
Interests: human-machine interactions; haptic interfaces; sensory perception
Interests: medical alarms; patient safety; multisensory integration
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Regulatory bodies have recognized the importance of medical alarm research and development as patient safety goals and a call-to-action in the research community. Nevertheless, despite various efforts to specify standards for audible alarms, e.g., IEC 60601-1-8, significant problems persist with alarm learnability, localizability, (physiology) information transfer, and alarm fatigue. There is growing evidence to suggest that delivery of alarm information via unisensory streams is sub-optimal, often overwhelming the processing ability and exacerbating fatigue of clinicians. Just as audio-only delivery is often problematic, especially in noisy settings, detection of visual alarms also depends on the stimuli being within the viewer’s perceptual field of vision.
In the everyday world, we routinely employ multimodal interaction. In human-computer interface design, multimodal interaction better leverages our human capabilities, and offers advantages such as enhanced flexibility, robustness to recognition error, and improved usability. Similarly, in the cognitively demanding environment of the healthcare setting, multimodal presentation may help overcome some of the challenges of unimodal alarms. From a research point of view, there are many questions that should be addressed. For instance, are the benefits of multisensory integration and facilitation primarily evident with weak stimuli, near the threshold of perception? If so, are these benefits negated in a setting where the auditory stream is extremely suprathreshold, as encountered in typical healthcare settings? What is the optimal combination of sensory streams that could address the problems of perception, localizability, information transfer, and attenuate alarm fatigue? User-related psychophysical studies with clear clinical translation needs to be investigated.
This Special Issue aims to provide a collection of high quality research articles that address broad challenges in both theoretical and applied aspects of multimodal medical alarms – capitalizing on neuroscience and engineering principles to improve patient monitoring, patient safety, and clinicians’ ability to leverage the use of multisensory integration in their clinical practice.
Prof. Jeremy R. Cooperstock
Dr. Joseph J. Schlesinger
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- Human-machine interaction
- Patient Safety
- Haptic interfaces
- Sensory perception
- Multisensory integration