Fixed is better than variable in alarm presentation?

NEWSLETTER ARTICLE

Process plants are not the only safety-critical environment plagued by false alarm rates. The health care industry is also suffering from the phenomenon which has resulted in system users ignoring alerts (what we would consider an alarm). A graphically-based permanent alert window was tested as an alternative to use of the current pop-up alerts (Rayo, Michael F., Kowalczyk, Nina, Liston, Beth W., Sanders, Elizabeth, White, Susan, and. Patterson, Emily S, "Comparing the Effectiveness of Alerts and Dynamically Annotated Visualizations (DAVs) in Improving Clinical Decision Making" Human Factors 57.6 (2015): 1002-1014). Not only was this approach preferred to the alerts that pop-up on the screen, it resulted in fewer errors.

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