Addressing the flaws of current critical alarms a fuzzy constraint satisfaction approach

Threshold alarms, the support supplied by commercial monitoring devices to supervise the signs that pathologies produce over physiological variables, generate a large amount of false positives, owing to the high number of artifacts in monitoring signals, and they are not capable of satisfactorily representing and identifying all monitoring criteria used by healthcare staff. The lack of an adequate support for monitoring the evolution of physical variables prevents the suitable exploitation of the information obtained when monitoring critical patients. This work proposes a solution for designing intelligent alarms capable of addressing the flaws and limitations of threshold alarms.

keywords: Patient monitoring, Intelligent alarms, Knowledge acquisition and representation, Fuzzy constraint satisfaction problems