Medical device alarms - The clinician

Abstract

The alarms of medical devices are a matter of concern in critical and perioperative care. The high rate of false alarms is not only a nuisance for patients and caregivers, but can also compromise patient safety and effectiveness of care. The development of alarm systems has lagged behind the technological advances of medical devices over the last 20 years. From a clinical perspective, major improvements of alarm algorithms are urgently needed. This requires not only methodological rigor and a good understanding of the clinical problems to be solved, but also adequate matching of statistical and computer science methods to clinical applications. It is important to see the broad picture of requirements for monitoring and therapy devices in general patient populations. This can only be achieved in close cooperation between clinicians, statisticians, and engineers. The Collaborative Research Centre SFB475 with its clinical and industrial partners can serve as an example for the successful cooperation to provide solutions to the challenges of biomedical technology. As part of the joint work new alarm algorithms have been developed and validated against large annotated clinical data sets. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.