Can Sonification Become a Useful Tool for Medical Data Representation?

This ‘vision’ paper refers to sonification – a novel method to represent data by sounds. A short theoretical background comprises the main features to attach sound to a set of data – how to map the correspondence between the sound parameters (pitch, duration) and the initial set of data. The classification of sonification methods is followed by a description of sound display tools – tempolenses and artifacts (saccadic display or loudness variations). The Results section comprises examples of sonification performed by our team: heart rate (HR), ECG signals, HR variations during exercise, including warning procedures. The procedure to evaluate the discriminant power of various sonification algorithms is then described. As a ‘vision’ paper, the most important part is not represented by the results, but the potential future developments, presented in the Discussion section, which starts with a critical view of the present state and presents future potential applications of sonification in medicine.