The Alarm Parsing Collapse Threshold in Automated Medical Care

Automated medical environments impose a non-negotiable cognitive and temporal boundary beyond which clinicians cannot reliably parse, prioritize, or act on alarms before physiological harm accumulates.

What This Work Exposes

This entry identifies the Alarm Parsing Collapse Threshold (APCT): a specific point at which cumulative alarm volume, rate, and complexity overwhelm human cognitive parsing capacity, causing error probability to spike discontinuously.

Beyond this threshold, additional alarms reduce safety rather than improve it. The failure is enforced by human cognitive limits, not by staffing, vigilance, or professionalism.

Enforced Constraint

Reality enforces a hard boundary at the level of human alarm parsing and contextual reconstruction speed. Once alarm input exceeds this boundary, safe clinical intervention cannot be guaranteed.

Exact Scale Where the Boundary Is Enforced

Cognitive / temporal. The limit is set by bounded human perception, working memory, prioritization, and decision latency under real-time overload.

Why Prevailing Approaches Fail

• Alarm systems optimize sensitivity, not human interpretability.
• False alarms are treated as benign rather than cumulative hazards.
• Safety models assume clinicians can always “catch up” after overload.
• Responsibility is presumed continuous, even during saturation.

These models fail once alarm input crosses the collapse threshold, where human parsing capacity is exhausted.

What Practice Refuses to Admit

• There are alarm regimes where no actor can act effectively.
• Increasing alarms can accelerate harm rather than prevent it.
• Responsibility assignment during collapse intervals is structurally incoherent.

Time Horizon

• Scientific validity: Immediate
• Experimental confirmation: Short-cycle (weeks to months)
• Operational adoption: Long-term, politically resistant

Relation to Other Work

This constraint belongs to a broader class of irreversible cognitive dead zones documented in:

• Aviation automation handoffs
• Autonomous vehicle control transitions

Governance

This entry does not propose new alarm products, staffing models, or policy mandates. It exists solely to expose a misclassified constraint enforced by reality.

Published as part of the Edge of Practice. Fixed at publication. Revision requires explicit versioning.