Alert Fatigue Simulator (2D)

Alert-system sensitivity

Few, well-targeted alerts.

Shift

Speed 1.5×

Clinician fatigue

Fatigue 0%Attentiveness 100%

This shift

Charts done

0 / 0

Alerts fired

Critical present

Critical fired

Caught

Missed (fatigue)

Overall critical catch rate

–

Low-value alert (noise)

Critical alert

Critical, caught

Compare settings

Setting	Alerts	Catch %

Run a full shift on each setting to compare.

Why more alerts can mean more misses

Each alert costs a moment of attention regardless of whether it turns out to matter. A "high sensitivity" configuration flags far more low-value warnings, so the same shift produces a much longer stream of alerts to click through.

fatigue += cost_per_alert  (every alert, regardless of value)
attentiveness = 1 − fatigue  (clamped)
P(catch critical alert) ≈ P(system fires it) × attentiveness

Low sensitivity fires few alerts, so fatigue barely rises — the clinician stays attentive.
High sensitivity fires an alert for more genuine critical issues, but the noise it also generates drives fatigue up fast, so critical alerts get skimmed and dismissed like everything else.
"Critical fired" and "Caught" are different numbers — the gap between them is fatigue-driven misses, not detection failure.

Low-value Critical Caught

Press "Start shift" to begin