5 ms·
A environment of multiple, repeating alarms - whether "Stall!" in a cockpit every 3 seconds, or a hospital room with multiple beeps, with only 8 of 1455 especia
by dmckeon 10y ago
A environment of multiple, repeating alarms - whether "Stall!" in a
cockpit every 3 seconds, or a hospital room with multiple beeps, with
only 8 of 1455 especially significant, sounds to me to be like being a
programmer trying to fix a critical problem with a PHB manager hovering
at one's shoulder, barking "Another server crashed" and "Have you fixed
it yet?" and similar several times a minute.
Perhaps such environments could benefit from a button that silenced all
current alarms for at least 30 seconds, leaving the operator a brief
quiet time to focus, modulo new alarms.
Asking the annoying manager to go to some mildly distant place to find
an appropriate manual or checklist binder (that may even exist!) may
work well for some programmers and some managers.
For a more common example, spend a few minutes in the lobby of a
busy or understaffed McDonalds and listen to the cacophony of beeps.
- CaptSpify 10y agoI wonder how much of this is "false alarms" as well. At my office, we had our disk-alert thresholds way too low for a while. Our intent was good: "If someone sees this and aren't busy, they'll jump on it when they get time". But that just meant that everyone ignored the alert until it was too late. Now, you don't want the threshold too high either, you have to find a balance. signal-to-noise is hard.
- lostlogin 10y agoPatient monitors have a "silence" button. Next time you are near one, have a look at the water patterns, as they are often well used.
- digi_owl 10y agoI do believe cockpits have a "master alarm off" button, that will shut it up until something new happens (or the problem state persists long enough).
- gaur 10y ago> with only 8 of 1455 especially significant This. It doesn't matter how clever you make the alarm. If it mostly goes off in the absence of real danger, you are teaching people to ignore it.