Wireless Alarms for Noisy Hospitals

January 20th, 2014
ideas
Hospitals are noisy busy places, which is not a good combination with people trying to rest and get better. Everyone seems to agree that quieter hospitals would be better, but the fixes hospitals are trying don't seem likely to help much: sound-absorbing tiles, whitenoise machines, color-coded lights that warn when volume gets too high. These are all good, but it looks like the worst offenders are elctronic alarms (Buxton, 2012). This makes sense: those are the sounds that are intentionally designed to alert people. The thing is, they're being broadcast to everyone when the patients don't actually need to hear them. What if we made them transmit wirelessly to receivers worn by the medical staff? So the patients wouldn't have to hear them at all?

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Ozy and Vasili Review Lilo and Stitch

Sometimes my seven-year-old, Vasili, wants to see some godawful movie that makes me want to melt my eyeballs out of my head.

via Thing of Things June 27, 2025

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

Workshop House case study

Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC.

via Home April 30, 2025

more     (via openring)