Neonatal Units can be very noisy places, with the amount of medical equipment, alarms, telephones and people's voices, and this can impact upon the babies' development.

ANSWER: At least, adding absorption to a room will help to prevent tinnitus.
Scientists from the California Ear Institute in San Ramon, California have discovered a potential cure for some instances of tinnitus in the nerve agent Botox. One in four tinnitus patients in a study experienced improvement in their symptoms following treatment with Botox, 16 reported no change and three said their tinnitus had become worse.

Of course preventing Tinnitus should be priority number one. Applying stricter acoustic demands will benefit the ones suffering from Tinnitus and will support to prevent tinnitus. Effiicient absorbing ceiling panels and wall panels will support the decrease of sound pressure levels.

Read more about the tests

From March to June this year, huge screening on 7-years old children’s hearing was done in 7 eastern provinces of Poland (with 42,3 % of total country population). During 4 months, 85% of seven years old children on this territory were examined. The results point out that 20% of them have different forms of permanent or temporary hearing impairment. Big scale of this problem indicate that more strict classroom acoustic demands, used to determine environment for hearing impaired persons, should be applied commonly to all types of schools.

Different room acoustic descriptors correspond to different human sound attributes. These attributes can, for ordinary rooms, be described as reverberance, speech clarity, auditory strength and spatial decay. If you want to know more about room acoustic descriptors, press here!
If you want to know which technical room acoustic descriptors Ecophon recommends matching these human attributes, please see below for;

Reverberance
Speech clarity
Auditory strength
Spatial decay

The Essex study ran for 5 months during the academic year 2007/8 during which period classrooms were repeatedly modified acoustically. Many objective and subjective measures were obtained and initial findings have been described as ‘very powerful’!

Dutch sports teachers (PE teachers) sued their employers for suffering serious hearing impairment because of working in a poor acoustic environment. The schools that employed the PE teachers compensate the teachers financially.

The Dutch Royal Society of Physical Exercise Teachers (KVLO) http://www.kvlo.nl/ supports the teachers in this matter.

A lot has been written about working conditions in call centres and other customer contact centres, but actually very little about acoustics. Apart from the fact that they are noisy and that employees tend to suffer from noise exposure similar to that of industry workers.
That is why, the French Stadardization body AFNOR, supported by INRS, a French Institute competent in the area of occupational risk prevention, organizes a full day on the subject. Some of the contributions:
- ergonomical approach
- hearing risks related to call centre work
- acoustic perfomance of call centre facilities: descriptors, workstation treatment vs room acoustic treatment, developments in head set technology and training of workers.

Venue: AFNOR, St Denis
Date: 19th of November, 9.15 - 17.15

Access the invitation

"The acoustical evaluation of rooms requires several room acoustic descriptors. Reverberation time alone is not enough!" says Erling Nilsson, Acoustics Specialist at Ecophon.

Room Acoustic Comfort™ (RAC™) means that, when performing an evaluation of room acoustics, it is important to take into account different types of rooms and what people do there.
Give priority to the different acoustic properties such as reverberance, speech clarity and sound level, depending on what the room is used

To learn what you can do to achieve Room Acoustic Comfort™, simply look here
To get the information in othere languages than english, go here and choose your country

Voice is a basic tool for teachers. Chronic voice disorders, very common among teaching staff, cause long term sick leaves or leaving the job for good (for other profession or for disability pension). In Poland, chronic voice disorders as a group of diseases are formally recognized as occupational disease. In 2007, officially confirmed voice disorders cases were the biggest group (24,4%) of all occupational diseases in Poland

Noise can make it more difficult to cope with pain. A nursing study performed by Barbra Blake Minckley showed that twice the number of patients were administrated pain medication when noise levels were “High” compared with “Low” or “Middle”.

Even quite moderate noise levels can potentially disturb the process of caring for the patient.
She said "If there was a way to facilitate the communication between staff members as well as prevent noise from propagating in the room, it would most likely become a more patient friendly environment".

A recent study called "Noise exposure in a neonatogical care unit and in incubators" demonstrated a far from ideal environment for neonatals inside incubators.

Summary
The noise exposure of premature infants in incubators is determined by the noise situation in the neonatological care unit and on the other hand by acoustical properties of the incubator, which should shield the premature infant against an excess of noise beside the primary life-saving functions. The noise inside a neonatological care unit is caused by lot of supplying and controlling devices provided with loud alarm functions, but also by the nursing staff and visitors.

The report can be ordered here

The Acoustics'08 Conference is now finished!

On behalf of all editors of Acoustic Bulletin we would like to thank all readers, the conference organisers, all those we have met at the Ecophon stand and especially those who we have had interviews with. We trust that your inputs will be of great value to many and we look forward to keep in touch. See you, and we hope you all have a great summer !!

Markku, Paulli, Tobias, Katja, Rainer, Jonas, Katrin, Martin, Per, Tina, Pierre, Colin, Anthony, Mikolaj, Guus, Mariëlle, Carsten, Erling and Marc

This is an interview with PhD Valtteri Hongisto, Senior Research Scientist at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and Adjunct Professor at Helsinki University of Technology.
He has performed a lot of acoustic research and has been involved in the creation of standards and guidelines, for example the Acoustic Classification of Spaces in buildings SFS 5907. Also he is one of the writers of the coming Finnish Classification on indoor climate.

Valtteri mentioned that the ISO standard 3382-3 will only deal with open-plan office acoustics and not with open plans in general, like in schools, libraries or hospitals. The focus will be on spacial attenuation and speech intelligibility. By doing that we can judge the performance at any distance from the speaker.

Listen to the interview (3,47 minutes).

By Pauli Pallaskorpi, Concept Developer - Education and Markku Hirvonen, Concept Developer - Healthcare, Ecophon Finland.