The Atlantic

The Hospital Is Too Damn Loud

The average hospitalized patient endures 350 alarms each day.
Source: Joerg Sarbach / AP

When the musician Yoko Sen was hospitalized a few years ago, she could not help but hear the hospital’s many alarms . Consider a cardiac monitor that beeps in C, she says, along with a bed-fall alarm that emits a high-pitched whine. Together, the two make a the “devil’s interval.”

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