Acoustic comfort assessment in hospital wards: measuring procedures and parameters.

Noise pollution is one of the most concerning environmental factors, as it can affect people's health. Especially the health of vulnerable people, such as children, the elderly, the sick or hospitalised. For this reason, particular attention must be paid to the design of hospital environments, within which noise can affect both the performance of healthcare personnel and the quality of sleep, and worse the recovery process, of patients. In this context, patients are the most vulnerable users as their extra-ordinary condition leads to less ability to cope with stress and greater sensitivity to noise. Nevertheless, numerous scientific studies show that the noise levels detected within hospital environments are highly above those indicated by the World Health Organisation, there are few proposals for effective noise reduction in wards. Our research starts from the need to ensure the acoustic comfort of patients during their stay in the ward. For this reason, the first purpose was to define a replicable survey method to assess the acoustic quality of inpatient wards, using acoustic characterisation measurements, sound pressure levels long-time monitoring and field observations. Specifically, the paper proposes the criteria applied in the selection of the case studies, the acoustic parameters analysed, and the measurement techniques used. The survey, which can be easily applied to different contexts, has currently been experimented within some Italian University Hospitals.