Designing the Vocal Alarm and improving medical ventilator

BACKGROUND: Today, as many as 1.5 million Americans use ventilators once in a year. Response to mechanical ventilation alarms remains to be one of the most challenging tasks facing physicians, nurses or other medical personnel in the ICU. In the present study we aimed to compare the response times to “vocal alarms” and “visual or audible ones”. METHODS: In the present study we developed a system to evaluate the “Vocal Alarm” and improve the medical ventilator “Benet 7200 Alarms” with it. Ventilator generates the alarms when patient has any problem. The time of Activation & Deactivation is recorded. The survey was done in central ICU for six days, 3 days with vocal alarm, and 3days with “Beep” alarms and detected Alarm events then recorded seventy-two hours of data for each type of alarms. All of events information saved in the memory and SPSS was used to determine difference between two types of alarms. RESULTS: On the average, the duration of the ventilator alarms activation were 33 ± 21 seconds for vocal alarms and 60 ± 46 for audible “Beep” alarms. The response times for vocal alarms were significantly lower (P = 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The response times for normal “Beep” alarms were longer than vocal alarms.