Patient Monitoring Roundtable No°1 | 2026: Beep! Alarm or just Noise? – The Potential of UX Sound Design in Healthcare
Save the date: The second roundtable of the year will take place on March 12 at the BALTIC at Charité on the topic of “Digital Twins & Dashboards for Data-Driven Therapy Strategies in Clinical Practice and Research.” Interested? Then book your ticket here for on-site or online participation!
“Beep! Alarm or just Noise? – The Potential of UX Sound Design in Healthcare” Under this motto, we gathered on January 28, 2026, for the first Patient Monitoring Roundtable (PMRT) of the year at the Berlin Simulation and Training Center (BeST).
When Alarms Kill: Why Healthcare Needs a Sound Revolution
The keynote started with an alarm.
Not a futuristic sound or something sleek – but the familiar, harsh beeping that fills intensive care units around the world. A historic sound in a world of future technology. Johannes Helberger used this moment deliberately, illustrating how deeply outdated sound design is in modern healthcare. Through short scenarios and sound examples, he made one thing painfully clear: sound is not a side issue. It is a safety issue.
The Beast of Alarms
Clinicians have developed two main coping mechanisms when dealing with constant alarms:
- Ban the beast
- Destroy what destroys you
In other words: silence, ignore, or turn down alarms to survive the workday.
This is not a failure of individual clinicians – it is a failure of system design. As Olekey & Schlesinger (2019) describe it, healthcare currently offers “the best of bad sound experience design.” A tragic consequence of this is alarm fatigue, which can and does lead to patient deaths when critical alarms are missed or muted.
Why Medical Alarms Fail
Today’s alarm sounds create a negative sound atmosphere that clinicians perceive as noise rather than information. The main pain points are well known:
- Poor differentiability – alarms sound too similar
- Low comprehensibility – it’s unclear what the alarm actually means
- Weak localizability – hard to tell where the sound comes from
- Problematic voice frequencies – high-pitched sounds increase stress and fatigue
Despite decades of technological progress in other areas, sound design has remained largely untouched. The reason for this status quo is a combination of: Lack of awareness, technological stagnation and outdated standards
A Rare Window of Opportunity
For the first time in years, several factors are aligning:
- Growing awareness of sound as a safety-critical design element
- Technological revolution in audio: lower costs, smaller hardware, and psychoacoustic techniques
- Regulatory pressure: an ISO (r)evolution that will become mandatory from 2028
This opens the door for a fundamental rethink of how alarms work – and sound icons may be the key.
Why Auditory Icons Matter
Auditory icons are sounds that resemble real-world events and are therefore intuitively understandable. Research shows that discriminating between simultaneous alarms is significantly easier when auditory icons are used instead of abstract beeps (Edworthy et al., 2022). Auditory icons offer exactly what today’s alarm systems lack:
- Differentiability
- Comprehensibility
- Localizability
- Better use of voice and lower frequencies
Instead of fighting attention, they work with human perception.
The True Potential of Sound
Well-designed sound can do much more than alert:
- Inform – communicate device type or status
- Steer attention – a scarce and valuable resource in clinical environments
- Enable intuitive, cross-cultural understanding
Sound has enormous potential to allow clinicians to work hands-free and eyes-free, increasing situational awareness while reducing cognitive load. If done right, this directly addresses alarm fatigue — which, as Johannes Helberger stated, is not the root problem but the result of many unresolved design failures.
How Do We Make It Work?
The path forward is clear:
- Awareness: Sound quality must become a factor in purchasing decisions – not an afterthought.
- Hardware first: Devices must be designed to support voice and lower frequencies from the start.
- Research: The problems are already proven. Now we need to validate solutions with the same rigor.
Conclusion
Healthcare has cutting-edge technology – but it still sounds like the past. If we want safer hospitals, better working conditions for clinicians, better healing conditions for patients and fewer preventable deaths, we must finally take sound seriously.
Because alarms should save lives – not endanger them.
Workshops: From Experience to Action
Listening Experiment: Status Quo vs. Future Soundscape
In the first workshop, participants experienced two different operating room sound environments. One group was exposed to today’s status quo alarm sounds, while the other experienced a future soundscape based on alternative sound design principles. Afterwards, participants completed an online survey evaluating the alarms.
“Good” sounds were consistently described as nature-related, harmonious, and low-frequency. In contrast, negative sounds were perceived as sudden, loud, beeping, penetrating, or based on extreme or changing frequencies.
In the final group discussion, survey results made the difference between old and new sound designs clearly visible (see below). The strongest effect was seen in alarm attribution: with the new sounds, all participants, regardless of background in clinical practice, industry, or research, were able to correctly identify which vital sign an alarm referred to. This was clearly not the case with alarms currently used in hospitals.
Future Workshop: Redesigning Alarm Systems by 2035
The second workshop focused on a forward-looking question: If we want to redesign acoustic alarm systems and implement them in hospitals by 2035, what needs to happen?
Using a backcasting approach, participants identified key challenges and requirements. The most critical aspects were:
- Financing
- Clinical workflows
- End-user involvement and acceptance
- Regulatory frameworks
- Research and validation needs
Together, these workshops showed that better alarm sound design is not only perceptually possible – it is also strategically achievable, if addressed systematically.
Next PMRT on March 12 at BALTIC
We look forward to welcoming you on March 12, 2026, at the second Patient Monitoring Roundtable of the year at Baltic, Charité! Our focus topic will be Digital Twins and Dashboards. Don’t miss it!
The Patient Monitoring Roundtable is organized by INCH Health in partnership with the Institute of Medical Informatics at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
A special thank you goes to our sponsors Masimo, Dräger, and Philips, whose support makes the Patient Monitoring Roundtable possible.
We also thank Johannes Helberger for his inspiring keynote, the Sound Innovation Lab team, Human Factors Consult, the Berlin Simulation and Training Center, and all participants for their engaged collaboration in developing future scenarios and visions for intelligent, safe, and patient-centered care.
