Observational Study of Clinician Attentional Reserves (OSCAR): Acuity-Based Rounds Help Preserve Clinicians' Attention.

Objectives: Team rounding in the ICU can tax clinicians' finite attentional resources. We hypothesized that a novel approach to rounding, where patients are seen in a decreasing order of acuity, would decrease attentional attrition.

Design: Prospective interventional internal-control cohort study in which stop signal task testing was used as a proxy for attentional reserves.

Acoustic features of auditory medical alarms-An experimental study of alarm volume.

Audible alarms are a ubiquitous feature of all high-paced, high-risk domains such as aviation and nuclear power where operators control complex systems. In such settings, a missed alarm can have disastrous consequences. It is conventional wisdom that for alarms to be heard, "louder is better," so that alarm levels in operational environments routinely exceed ambient noise levels.