Wow! How? Hospital Alarms

Yoko Sen is a musician who, when spending time in a hospital as a patient in 2012, noticed that her cardiac monitor and another patient’s fall-risk alarm created a spooky chord known as the devil’s interval. Composers use it sparingly because it sounds so foreboding. Even in a weakened state, Sen began asking questions about why patients are subjected to this beeping cacophony. She soon joined an ongoing, worldwide effort by engineers, researchers, and clinicians to improve the hospital acoustic environment.

In 2015 she founded Sen Sound and set about collecting data, experimenting with alternative tones, and speaking publicly about what she and her collaborators were discovering.

Through her imaginative presentations, Sen was able to remind people why they were attracted to health care and device design in the first place – to heal and soothe. She credits Champions like Larry Chu of Stanford Medicine X and Nick Dawson of the Sibley Innovation Hub for giving her a chance to perform and experiment, which then attracted the attention of other powerful collaborators.

Instead of trying to blend into the corporate world, Sen leaned into the role that artists often play: the spark that ignites new thinking.

Sen also “moves at the speed of trust” since there is natural resistance to change when it comes to hospital alarms, since safety is at stake. Her team took small, incremental steps to help the medical device industry warm up to the idea of transformative change. They also co-designed patient monitoring alarms with, as they put it, “those who hear them,” such as nurses, physicians, patients, family caregivers, and other stakeholders.

The FDA recently granted clearance for new patient monitoring software co-designed by global device maker Philips and SenSound. Together they “worked to soften and round the alarm tones and adjust alarm intervals to more gently signal status or request action using a more soothing – yet still impactful – set of alarm sounds.”

In the Rebel Health lexicon, Sen is a Solver. She was driven to take apart the hospital soundscape and put it back together, better.