[akira2501]

> In an airplane, the environment is highly controlled

Aircraft systems are developed independently and added as options to planes. Which means they get swapped out, there are variants in capabilities, and multiple manufacturers involved.

> This can lead to cognitive overload when multiple systems issue verbal warnings simultaneously.

This is a known phenomenon on flights as well. There is some speculation it played a part in Air France 447. The plane technically _was_ telling the pilots the _precise_ problem they faced, but in the sea of other warnings they were entirely lost.

> tone alarms might be easier to manage and differentiate than multiple overlapping verbal warnings.

If you're a nurse, is the fact you have a ventilation alarm in one room and a temperature alarm in a different room that can be discerned without visual confirmation a useful feature in a health care setting?

I think the big difference is your flight has 2 people responsible for hundreds of lives. In the hospital you would hope the ratio would be more favorable.

[Dalewyn]

>Aircraft systems are developed independently and added as options to planes. Which means they get swapped out, there are variants in capabilities, and multiple manufacturers involved.

He means there is only ever one aircraft (the one you're flying) and hundreds of patients in a hospital.

Imagine if you will, hundreds of GPWS alarms are blaring off all screaming TERRAIN PULL UP TERRAIN PULL UP PULL TERRAIN UP UPTERRAIN PULL TERRPULLAINUP UPULLPTERRAIN TERRPULLAINUP PULLRAIN TEUPR...

That's both alarm fatigue[1] and the alarms being wholly impractical to begin with. For starters, which GPWS wants to be pulled up again? You can't know, there's hundreds! And that's even assuming you can make out TERRAIN PULL UP in the maelstrom of noise.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue

[akira2501]

Yea, I kinda got myself there in a roundabout way in the end.

In any case, if that's the environment, then it reminds me of our solutions for broadcast studio alarms. There was a combined master tone alarm in the engineering control room, and a set of annunciators for each station, with three levels of severity for each. You'd hear the tone, snap your head around to look at the board, and quickly be able to tell what you were dealing with and where the priority problems were.

Likewise, in the hallway leading up to the studios, there were colored flashing lights above each studio door that also displayed the alarm level for that studio. Those were completely silent, for obvious reasons, but their flashing pattern got your attention anyways. They were arranged vertically according to severity so even if you were color blind you could understand them at a distance.

Then inside the studios there were more detailed annunciators that would actually display which part of the air chain monitoring was causing the global alarm signal. These were also silent, but did not flash, and had a clock that would pause when the first error became displayed.