Using Model Checking to Detect Masking in IEC 60601-1-8-compliant Alarm Configurations

Abstract

The failure of humans to respond to auditory medical alarms has resulted in numerous patient injuries and deaths. The widely used IEC 60601-1-8 international medical alarm standard was created to improve alarm discernibility and identification. Unfortunately, the melodic tonal patterns of IEC 60601-1-8’s alarms are particularly susceptible to simultaneous masking, a condition where concurrent sounds interact in ways that make one or more of them imperceptible. This paper presents a method, which builds on a previous implementation, that uses a novel combination of psychophysical modeling and model checking to detect masking in a modeled configuration of IEC 60601-1-8 alarms. We describe our updated method and demonstrate its power by using it to find masking in the alarms of an actual IEC 60601-1-8-compliant telemetry monitoring system. Results and future research are discussed.

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