![]() In this paper we first provide an overview of ECG signals and explain the ST-elevation pathology. On the one hand, we need to find methods to convey information reliably so that the resulting sounds can support physicians in their monitoring and diagnostic tasks and, on the other hand, we need to account for aesthetic qualities that take into consideration ear fatigue and other soundscape elements from the medical environment. The current challenges in medical sonification can be addressed from two sides. Additionally, a noisy environment can cause ear fatigue thus increasing mental distress and irritability to people exposed to the sounds . For example, constant alarm sounds generate a higher cognitive load in the medical staff leading to delayed responses or underestimation of alarms when treating the patients. However, having a larger number of sounding devices in medical scenarios also creates a set of challenges that need to be addressed. Nevertheless, the use of sonification in health does not only provide options for monitoring but it also opens a wide range of applications to support diagnostics and rehabilitation tasks. The device produces a short duration sound of a given frequency that is synchronized with the pulse rate, when the oxygen saturation level decreases, the pitch of the resulting sound decreases as well. One example is the pulse oximeter which is used for measuring oxygen saturation levels of the blood. In the medical field, sonification is already frequently used as a monitoring tool. Furthermore, the temporal resolution of the human auditory system provides high performance in detecting changes and patterns in the signals, which makes sonification a good asset for time-series monitoring. One of the advantages of representing data through sound, is that users can focus their attention on a primary task while being aware of changes in the signals of interest. At present, there is a wide range of applications where sonification has been presented as a supporting monitoring tool in industrial, domestic or work environments. the systematic auditory representation of data as sound, for process monitoring has greatly expanded in recent years. Overall, the group of experts obtained lower error rates than the group of non-experts, which means that further training could improve accuracy rates and, particularly for designs that rely mainly on pitch variations, additional training is needed in the non-experts group. Furthermore, we found a significant difference between sound/music experts and non-experts in terms of the error rates obtained in the detection task using the morph sonification and also in the classification task using the stethoscope sonification. Concerning aesthetics, the water ambience sonification was regarded as the most pleasant. The study results show that the polarity design had the highest accuracy rates in the detection task whereas the stethoscope sonification obtained the better score in the classification assignment. The study evaluates three components across the proposed sonifications (1) detection performance, meaning if participants are able to detect a transition from healthy to unhealthy states, (2) classification accuracy, that evaluates if participants can accurately classify the severity of the pathology, and (3) aesthetics and usability (pleasantness, informativeness and long-term listening). The other two designs, (iii) the water ambience sonification and the (iv) morph sonification, were presented in our previous work about ECG sonification (Aldana Blanco AL, Steffen G, Thomas H (2016) In: Proceedings of Interactive Sonification Workshop (ISon). As part of the evaluated sound designs, we propose two novel sonifications: (i) Polarity sonification, a continuous parameter-mapping sonification using a formant synthesizer and (ii) Stethoscope sonification, a combination of the ECG signal and a stethoscope recording. ![]() ![]() Since myocardial infarction represents a life-threatening condition it is of essential value to detect an ST-elevation as early as possible. In particular we focus on an ECG abnormality called ST-elevation which is an important indicator of a myocardial infarction. This paper presents the design and evaluation of four sonification methods to support monitoring and diagnosis in Electrocardiography (ECG). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |