A comforting voice from home might be enough to soothe ICU patients on ventilation, a new study says.

As many as 4 in 5 ICU patients on mechanical ventilation develop delirium, or sudden confusion, panic, upset and anger.

But playing recorded messages from a family member can reorient patients and help them remain calm, researchers reported Nov. 1 in the American Journal of Critical Care.

“The evidence has long shown that family involvement is a key element in delirium prevention and interventions, but families often face challenges to fully participating in their loved ones’ care,” lead researcher Cindy Munro, dean emeritus of the University of Miami School of Nursing and Health Studies, said in a news release.

For the study, researchers recruited 178 ICU patients on mechanical ventilation and randomly assigned half to receive recorded messages from a family member.

The study occurred in nine ICUs at two large South Florida hospitals between April 2018 and November 2020, with a three-month pause during the COVID-10 pandemic.

The recorded messages, each two minutes long, played hourly during usual daytime waking hours between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., researchers said.

The messages recorded by a family member used the person’s name, reminded them where they were and let them know that they were on ventilation and might have other wires and tubes in place to help them recover.

The messages also reminded the sick person that both health care professionals and family members were regularly looking in on them.

“We designed this intervention to augment family presence so that a patient could hear from a loved one, even if their family wasn’t able to physically be at the bedside,” Munro said.

People given the personalized messages from family members had significantly more delirium-free days than those who didn’t get them, results show.

The results also suggest that the more often patients hear these messages, the greater their number of delirium-free days, researchers said.

“Scripted family-recorded voice messages are potentially high-impact, low-cost nonpharmacological interventions that can prevent delirium in patients receiving mechanical ventilation in the ICU,” researchers concluded in their study.