Reducing Annoyance of Healthcare Soundscapes with Harmonious Alarms

Recent research and amendments to standards have called for a paradigm shift when designing for healthcare spaces. While these are currently populated with melodic, hard to learn alarms and other noise sources, the benefits of harmonious alarms inside healing soundscapes seem promising for patients. We propose alarms for the Temperature IEC 60601-1-8 category which were designed considering psychoacoustic and musical knowledge. Effort was made to abide by design recommendations while including new information such as the direction change of the vital sign being monitored (increasing or decreasing), and also manipulating harmonicity to trigger certain emotional percepts. Relevant human factors and organizational factors are discussed, as the consequences of having carefully curated, generative healing soundscapes still need to be researched from a patient, healthcare professional and organizational perspective.