Following on from the discussions on the events in the BP control room, we spotted this piece in the New York Times which serves as a timely reminder of the problems of nuisance alarms and excessive alarm rates.
As Human Factors professionals and control room designers, one of our most common tasks is to persuade engineers that not every alarm need to be presented to the operator and safe ways have to be found of managing situations that cause high rates of alarms. We hope that it is a problem that is becoming better understood and recognised.Labels: alarms, interaction, interface