A new generation of medical devices is arriving: more autonomous, more complex, more connected. This asks more of sound and opens new ground for it. Sound Innovation Lab has built a team of designers and scientists, together with partners from clinical practice, to meet that shift and improve how people and machines interact.
Auditory icons, UX & feedback sounds or alarms: signals that are intuitively understood and add up to a brand experience across the fleet.
Guidance by ear through the procedure. Eyes stay on the patient, hands stay on the instrument.
Apps that guide by sound and sound modules that run inside the product. From concept to interaction design.
Sound design for a medical product is a demanding and wide-ranging task. Regulation, clinical reality and brand all meet in a single signal. We take that on as a partner and stay with the process, from the first analysis to the documentation that goes into the approval file.
Where your device communicates today, by ear and on screen. Psychoacoustic analysis, standards check, prioritised recommendations.
A coherent sound system for a single device or a whole fleet. Alarm hierarchy, auditory icons, status and guidance sounds that take pressure off the display.
Measurements and listening studies with clinical staff. Response time, cognitive load, tolerance across a shift. Evidence before and after.
Documentation that eases the approval path. Built onto existing standards and processes, designed to interoperate.
Signals that are understood and belong together. We shape alarms and status signals so they carry meaning, sit at the right priority, and work as one system across every device in the room.
The updated alarm standard opened medical alarms to auditory icons: a sound that carries its meaning. A heartbeat for cardiac, a bubbling for infusion, a breath for ventilation. Clinical teams need that clarity, and the standard leaves real room to design. How well that room is used decides whether a device is understood or merely heard.
A uniform tone, equally urgent everywhere. Even if it is not an actual alarm. Hard to place, tiring, stress inducing.
A sound that sounds like its meaning. Distinct per device and function, clear in priority, present without alarming. Higher quality, easier to bear across a shift.
The devices in a fleet come from different teams and different product generations, and they sound like it. We work out the rules that hold them together: shared tonal material, and a clear place in it for each function. A pump is never mistaken for a ventilator, and both belong to the same family.
We benchmarked 86 alarm sounds across 17 manufacturers. Most leave quality on the table.
Every recommendation stands on data from our own clinical listening studies. Which sound is understood, how fast, how clearly, and how well people tolerate it.
Guidance by ear, eyes on the patient. Step cues, direction and confirmation arrive through sound, so attention stays where it matters and the visual load drops. The lever we introduced for alarms, carried into the whole workflow.
Sound that leads through a procedure without a glance at the screen. Step cues, direction and confirmation arrive by ear. Hands stay on the task, the field of view stays on the patient.
Less to read, more understood. Every cue we design has one job and one place in the sequence. Teams learn the language in a session and trust it under pressure.
Symbolic image.
Acoustic guidance turns a measurement into a sound. Position, alignment, depth, dose: wherever a value has a correct state, the ear can hold it without a glance.
Today that confirmation sits on a screen. A light turns green, and whoever is working looks up to check. Every look up is a look away. We move the confirmation into the ear. A steady tone means on target. As the value drifts, the sound says by how much.
A tool approaches a target point: the impulses move closer together, and at the target they settle into one held tone. The same mapping carries a navigated pointer that marks positions on a patient, an alignment step, a depth stop or a dosing dial.
Sound that belongs in the product. From patient facing apps that guide by ear to the sound software that runs inside the device, the app and the wearable.
Health apps ask for attention many times a day, and most of them ask for it on a screen. Sound carries the same guidance to people who cannot follow a display: in bed, in a waiting room, with the eyes closed or with both hands busy.
We design the sound logic and the timing so it feels natural, and we test whether it changes behaviour. Steps, pace, confirmation and progress all arrive by ear.
Symbolic image, generated with AI.
Auditory icons and priority levels for one device or a fleet, ready for the standard.
Distance, direction and confirmation cues that react in real time to tracking data.
Confirmations, transitions and errors for touch, voice and hardware controls.
Timing, movement and adherence cues for patient facing apps and wearables.
Reusable interaction sound modules and sound software for health, from our own AI and DSP work. Realtime and embeddable, built for the device, the app and the wearable.
One partner from the first sketch to the shipped build. We design the sound, write the logic that plays it, and hand over code your team can integrate and your auditors can read.
Scene recreated with AI, the original is under NDA.
For a leading manufacturer in digital surgery we scored a robotic system: state changes, interaction, navigation, warnings. A complete sound language for one of the most demanding environments there is.
Developed along clinical workflows, tuned with users, built for clarity under stress. Less to read on screen, more understood by ear.
Symbolic image, generated with AI.
SIL Medical is carried by the design team of Sound Innovation Lab Berlin and a close partnership with the Audio Communication Group at TU Berlin. Published methods, peer reviewed, measurement as the foundation.
Every project here serves the same goal as the rest of the lab: make the meeting of people and machines more intuitive, more pleasant and more meaningful.
Design, research and engineering sit in one team in Berlin.
The whole team at Sound Innovation Lab