Scalable Earcons: Bridging the Gap between Intermittent and Continuous Auditory Displays

The development of blood pressure earcons for patient monitoring is used to illustrate how data that varies from intermittent to continuous sampling can be integrated into a single auditory display design. A scalable-earcon structure that extends the concept of hierarchies of earcons is proposed for representing blood pressure information. This structure allows the earcon to be used to produce intermittent earcons or a continuous sonification of blood pressure measurements. The results of two blood pressure earcon studies indicate that people can use the earcon to elicit large amounts of information with few major errors.