Wear your heart on your sleeve: A test of vibrotactile displays of pulse oximetry

In clinical environments, clinicians use many auditory and visual displays to convey medical information. This can cause a noisy and cluttered environment, which can lead to alarm fatigue, whereby clinicians become overwhelmed and fail to respond or turn off alarms and displays, which threatens patient safety. Vibrotactile displays may assist in reducing the behavioral consequences of alarm fatigue by transferring some information from the overused auditory and visual displays. Previous studies using a novel vibrotactile display found that it could support a high identification accuracy, but that participants experienced performance decrements when multitasking with a high perceptual motor load task. The aim of the current experiment was to test two modifications of the vibrotactile display under high load and compare them to the original display to see if it was possible to create a display that supports a high accuracy even under high perceptual load. It was predicted that the two new designs would support an identification accuracy of above 90% and that the two new designs would support a higher identification accuracy than the old display. Results showed that none of the designs supported an identification accuracy of above 90%. The results also suggest that the new designs do not support a higher identification accuracy than the old design. Future research should aim to support a high identification accuracy under high load through adaptation of the display design or modification of participant training.