Multimodal head-mounted display for multimodal alarms in intensive care units

In many safety-critical application scenarios human operators are confronted with alarms that have spatially distributed sources such as in intensive care units. As it stands, different systems are offering simple and often unspecific alerts, leaving the human with the demanding task of identifying and localizing the problem, which often results in high cognitive load and alert fatigue. In this work, we present a pervasive wearable alarm system in form of a multimodal head-mounted display (HMD) to represent alarms for responsible healthcare providers. The HMD consists of a frame-based on safety glasses, Adafruit Neopixel LEDs, bone-conductive speakers, and vibration motors on each temple of the glasses attached to an Adafruit Feather M0. The prototype delivers early insights into the development of a head-mounted prototype to compare modalities and finally to evaluate the suitability of alternative alarm representations on an HMD.