Distributed noise monitoring in intensive care units

Gianluca Memoli , Deborah Dawson , Richard Barham , Mike Grounds

Intensive Care Units (ICUs) can be extremely noisy places, with staff conversation and equipment alarms are often cited as extremely disturbing. These noises are frequently implicated in causing sleep disruption and may have deleterious effects on patient recovery and staff wellbeing alike. This study aims to assess the acoustical environment in the General Intensive Care Unit at St. George’s Hospital in London, and produce a longitudinal noise map. The study exploits novel noise measurement instrumentation utilising MEMS microphones, which makes a distributed noise system economically viable. This presents the first ever opportunity to produce detailed noise maps based on measurement in a hospital ward environment. The noise map will identify the areas within the ICU that are systematically noisier than surrounding areas, and provide details about temporal variations which can be correlated to specific activities as well as any systematic link with time of the day or week. As a first step, characterising the performance of the instrumentation, especially the measurement microphone at its installed location, is essential for assuring the accuracy of gathered data. Results of laboratory simulations of the measurement environment are presented, together with some initial acoustic data gathered from the ICU.

Mots clés: hospital; intensive care; noise mapping; MEMS

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Gianluca Memoli, Deborah Dawson, Richard Barham, Mike Grounds. Distributed noise monitoring in intensive care units. Acoustics 2012, Apr 2012, Nantes, France. ⟨hal-00811377⟩