Testing Alarm Fatigue in a Nursing Simulation

Overview

Alarm fatigue is recognized as a significant risk to both patient safety and the well-being of healthcare professionals. This is a huge safety concern in hospitals. Frequent exposure to non-critical alarms may cause healthcare workers to ignore or miss important life-threatening alarms. The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether a filtered alarm environment improves the recognition of critical alarms compared with a standard alarm environment while participants completed a cognitive task. Participants between the ages of 16 and 65 with no prior medical background will complete two separate five-minute scenarios while listening to audio recordings of various hospital alarms. In the first scenario, participants will listen to a recording that contains standard hospital alarm sounds, including both critical and non-critical alarms. In the second scenario, they will listen to a filtered recording that includes both critical alarms and non-critical alarms, but the non-critical alarms will be fewer or quieter overall. Each recording scenario will contain eight critical alarms placed at specific intervals. During both scenarios, participants will complete paper-based cognitive worksheets. These worksheets included math problems, matching, and spelling activities. The worksheets are not graded, and are not evaluated based on how many answers they get correct. The purpose of the worksheets is to keep the participants’ brains engaged, similar to the workload nurses experience during their 12-hour shift. What the experiment is measuring is not academic performance, but how many critical alarms participants notice and log while distracted by cognitive work. Participants will be instructed to mark a box on their worksheet each time they hear a critical alarm. The data we are collecting is on alarm detection. The data we collected included the number of correct alarms logged, the number of missed alarms, and the number of false alarms recorded for each scenario. The results were averaged and compared between the standard and filtered alarm scenarios. Results showed that participants identified more critical alarms and missed fewer alarms in the filtered alarm environment than in the standard alarm environment. These findings suggest that reducing unnecessary alarm noise may improve nurses' ability to recognize and respond to critical events, improving patient safety and reducing alarm fatigue among healthcare professionals.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Behavioral & Social Sciences (Junior Division) · Entry J-03-22

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• CSEF Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2026 project