Clinician-in-the-Loop Annotation of ICU Bedside Alarm Data

In this work, we describe the state of clinical monitoring in the intensive care unit and operating room, where patients are at their most fragile and thus monitoring is most heightened. We describe how large amounts of data generated by monitoring patients’ physiologic signals, along with the ubiquitous aspecific threshold alarms in use today, cause dangerous alarm fatigue for medical caregivers. In order to build more specific, more useful alarms, we gathered a novel data set that would allow us to assess the number, types, and utility of alarms currently in use in the intensive care unit. To do this, we developed a system to collect physiologic monitor data, alarms, and annotations of those alarms provided electronically by clinicians. We describe the collection process for this novel data set and provide a preliminary description of the data.