There is nothing more laborious then reading a setting in layman's terms, unless it's intriguingly put into layman's terms.
I'm confused what you mean by this. Are you saying it is boring to read a direct description of a setting? I don't really know how I could've spiced it up without being circuitous, and its only 4 sentences, so its not like that paragraph is very long. Sure, it's not poetry, but I don't understand what makes the opening so boring for you.
Come one, you can come up with better descriptive text then: "The heartbeat monitor".
While I generally appreciate critique, I do not appreciate when the critique becomes "you're better than this". Mostly because it implies that you don't think I tried in the first place. In this particular circumstance, I'm curious what you think would have been better than "The heartbeat monitor", especially given that is the correct term for what I'm describing.