Sound-driven design for healthcare: From designing alarms to developing a Silent ICU

Dr. Elif Özcan: Sound-driven design for healthcare: From designing alarms to developing a Silent ICU

Designing for healthcare is a complex process that involves a participatory approach incorporating diverse input from many stakeholders such as healthcare providers, patients, engineers, data scientists, ethicist, social scientists, economist, implementation scientists, etc. In this talk, I will demonstrate how we conduct sound-driven design in the field of critical care and present the evolution of our alarm design approach from designing only the alarm signals to being part of an international team that develops, implements and evaluates the technical concept of “Smart and Silent ICU” with the wellbeing of critically ill patients in mind.

Bio

Currently, I am leading the sound-driven design and research activities within Critical Alarms Lab (TU Delft) by which we focus on improving the sounds and soundscapes of healthcare environments. I am also a WP leader in a publicly funded EU Innovative Healthcare Initiative (IHI) project entitled “Smart and Silent ICU” through which we measure the physiological, biological and psychological effects of medical alarms on critically ill patients. Simultaneously I am starting up a research project “Auditory Footprints” funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO - Open Technology Programme) on developing novel technologies for monitoring environmental sounds.