Alarm in the ICU! Envisioning Patient Monitoring and Alarm Management in Future Intensive Care Units

Today’s intensive care units (ICUs) pose a design dilemma considering the use of technology and its psychological effects on the inhabitants of the ICU. While the ICUs are designed to be technologically advanced in order to ensure patient safe recovery, the very technology that ICUs rely on threatens patients’ as well as clinicians’ wellbeing. Especially the system behind patient monitoring and the consequent alarm management needs to be reconsidered from the human perspective to prevent any occurrences of clinician alarm fatigue and post-traumatic stress syndrome observed in patients as well as their visitors. Moreover, advancements in patient monitoring technology, medical informatics, and societal developments offer new possibilities to give patient data a central role specifically in alarm management and clinician workflow in the ICUs in general. In this chapter, we envision a data-driven product-service system for patient monitoring in the future critical care context. Our design ideas and future vision are based on a critical review of the literature in patient monitoring, trend analysis, and technological developments in medical care, followed by a stakeholder analysis, the design of a future vision concept and scenario that we validated with expert interviews.