An integrative display for patient monitoring

Research being conducted to identify beneficial strategies for integrating displays and signals used in anesthesia monitoring is reported. It is motivated by the fact that the anesthesiologist's equipment is typically procured over time from a variety of vendors, so that the anesthesiologist's task is made more difficult by a diversity of instrument behaviors and display formats. An experiment that compared intervention decisions made viewing parameters presented in a separated strip chart format and in the form of an integrated geometric object is described. The study investigated the detection of idealized physiological events, each presenting its classic symptoms. Anesthesiologists using unfamiliar displays rapidly recognized these emergencies under either display format, usually within 30 s. However, the object display reduced response latencies and led to intervention at less extreme parameter values without appreciable increase in false alarm rates.