Call for Papers: Multimodal Technologies and Interaction special issue on Multimodal Medical Alarms

Dear Colleagues,

Please note the following CFP for a special issue of Multimodal 
Technologies and Interaction: 
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/mti/special_issues/multimodalmedical_alarms 
(Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2018). Prospective 
authors are encouraged to contact the special issue editors with their 
proposed abstracts for early comments:


Regulatory bodies have recognized the importance of medical alarm 
research and development as patient safety goals and a call-to-action in 
the research community. Nevertheless, despite various efforts to specify 
standards for audible alarms, e.g., IEC 60601-1-8, significant problems 
persist with alarm learnability, localizability, (physiology) 
information transfer, and alarm fatigue. There is growing evidence to 
suggest that delivery of alarm information via unisensory streams is 
sub-optimal, often overwhelming the processing ability and exacerbating 
fatigue of clinicians. Just as audio-only delivery is often problematic, 
especially in noisy settings, detection of visual alarms also depends on 
the stimuli being within the viewer’s perceptual field of vision.

In the everyday world, we routinely employ multimodal interaction. In 
human-computer interface design, multimodal interaction better leverages 
our human capabilities, and offers advantages such as enhanced 
flexibility, robustness to recognition error, and improved usability. 
Similarly, in the cognitively demanding environment of the healthcare 
setting, multimodal presentation may help overcome some of the 
challenges of unimodal alarms. From a research point of view, there are 
many questions that should be addressed. For instance, are the benefits 
of multisensory integration and facilitation primarily evident with weak 
stimuli, near the threshold of perception? If so, are these benefits 
negated in a setting where the auditory stream is extremely 
suprathreshold, as encountered in typical healthcare settings? What is 
the optimal combination of sensory streams that could address the 
problems of perception, localizability, information transfer, and 
attenuate alarm fatigue? User-related psychophysical studies with clear 
clinical translation needs to be investigated.

This Special Issue aims to provide a collection of high quality research 
articles that address broad challenges in both theoretical and applied 
aspects of multimodal medical alarms – capitalizing on neuroscience and 
engineering principles to improve patient monitoring, patient safety, 
and clinicians’ ability to leverage the use of multisensory integration 
in their clinical practice.

Prof. Jeremy R. Cooperstock
Dr. Joseph J. Schlesinger
/Guest Editors/

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*Jeremy Cooperstock* <http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/%7Ejer>
Professor | Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering 
<http://www.mcgill.ca/ece/>| McGill University <http://www.mcgill.ca/>
Member |Centre for Intelligent Machines <http://www.cim.mcgill.ca>
Member |Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and 
Technology <http://www.cirmmt.org>
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