Disturbed Sleep: Estimating Night-time Sound Annoyance at a Hospital Ward

Hospital soundscapes are often associated with unhealthy sound levels and an overall perception of chaos and annoyance. Over the past four decades, concerns about the harmful effects of environmental noise on hospital stakeholders (patients, families, and healthcare professionals) were repeatedly raised by the scientific community. In this paper, the authors report a study they have conducted on the analysis of the acoustic environment of a multi-patient room in the Neurology unit in a Dutch hospital. The study employed sound source annotations by listeners to focus on what we claim is the most important emotional descriptor, namely annoyance. More than 9,000 sound events and their perceived annoyance were identified in over 400 night-time audio recordings. Analysis revealed that while patient-generated sounds such as snoring dominate the night-time soundscape and are identified as highly annoying, personnel-generated sounds such as speech might have an even higher accumulated annoyance when the duration of individual sound events is taken into account. This finding indicates the possibility of designerly approaches to improving the hospital ward environment by focussing on interventions to increase awareness of the impact of specific sound events on patient’s sleep quality, and support actions to mitigate negative effects.