Study On Acoustic Environment Of Nursing Units In Nursing Homes

With the increasingly serious aging of the population in China,the construction of old-age buildings is increasing,and the operators and designers begin to pay attention to the quality of life of the elderly.Nursing unit is not only the basic unit of nursing service provided by nursing institutions,but also the main space for the elderly to rest and sleep daily.Therefore,the building acoustic environment affects both the health of the elderly and the work efficiency of nursing staff,but there are few studies involved.This study selected six of six nursing home nursing units in Chongqing,by the elderly in the nursing unit of the sound environment and nursing staff subjective evaluation and objective acoustic parameters measurement of nursing unit,and acoustic noise behavior observation model building,to find the existing problems in the nursing unit acoustic environment,puts forward effective strategies for improving,for nursing home nursing unit humanized design and provide a scientific basis for the relevant specification.Subjective evaluation of acoustic environment in nursing units showed that the functional space in nursing units was the space where the elderly and nursing staff stayed for the longest time in nursing homes.Both of them pay more attention to the acoustic environment in the care unit,and give relatively positive evaluation to the acoustic environment.However,the results of sound perception and sound preference showed that there were a lot of talking sounds in the care unit,and Shouting was the most annoying for both of them,and the natural sounds they liked the most were the least.For example,the elderly generally pay more attention to the acoustic environment and generally have a lower evaluation on the comfort level of the acoustic environment.The elderly think that most sound sources are noise,while the nursing staff generally have a higher evaluation on all kinds of sound sources.Correlation analysis found that the evaluation of acoustic environment for the elderly decreased with the increase of time spent in the nursing unit,while the nursing staff did not.The measured study of objective acoustic environmental parameters found that thefunctional area to the indoor background noise,and then to the indoor acoustic quality.In terms of sound pressure level,daytime nursing stations and surrounding rest Spaces have higher noise levels,which are external noise sources for the elderly living rooms.At night,the average level of background noise in the rooms of the elderly in normal use at night is 50d BA.Such a noise level will affect the sleep of the elderly,which is mainly affected by environmental noise and noise emitted by human sleep.In terms of reverberation time,the average reverberation time of the elderly’s rooms,nursing stations and surrounding rest areas in 500-1000Hz is 0.44-0.68s and 0.57-1.54s,respectively.According to the spectrum distribution,it is found that the elderly’s rooms should be subjected to low frequency and high frequency sound absorption processing,and the nursing stations and surrounding rest Spaces should focus on the intermediate frequency processing.During the observation period,a total of 22 kinds of noise sources were detected,including 13 kinds of human noise sources and 9 kinds of equipment noise sources.The sound of the equipment is mainly medium and high frequency,and the L_Amax of 6 devices is greater than 65d BA.Caregivers were responsible for 16 types of noise,compared to just nine for the elderly,and caregivers were the primary users of the equipment.Nursing staff do not know the noise because of the need to produce a lot of work,and the elderly as passive noise receivers,resulting in cognitive contradictions.From the point of view of location,nursing station and the surrounding rest space nursing station location because of both work,rest,traffic functions,so the most kinds of sound,sound time is also the longest.In the corridor area,there are fewer types of vocalization,and the duration and frequency of vocalization outside the room are related to personal living habits.Generally speaking,elevator and voice sound have short sound duration but high frequency,and some sound sources such as TV sound have short sound frequency but long sound duration,which together result in excessive noise in public areas.According to the behavior observation results,the acoustic model of the care unit based on Agent modeling was constructed by using the behavioral model and acoustic model.The simulated SPL basically conforms to the measured SPL variation with time,and the L_Aeq10min error is between 0.07 and 4.85d BA.Based on the reliability of the model,it is found that the average sound absorption coefficient in the modified space can improve the acoustic parameters obviously by modifying the parameters at the input end of the model.The effect of increasing the height of the ceiling on the improvement of acoustic environment is limited.Reducing the sound pressure level of the voice,especially the loud voice,can effectively reduce the sound pressure level.And only reducing the noise behavior and voice volume of nursing staff at the nursing station location can also effectively reduce the sound pressure level.Therefore,in the noise reduction of the public area in the care unit,attention should be paid to both the controllable objective variables and the influence of subjective behaviors,and multi-pronged approach should be taken.Finally,from three perspectives of behavioral noise control,external noise control and internal acoustic environment improvement measures,from subjective factors to objective variables,the study explores the acoustic environment of the care unit,and provides a basis for the formulation of standards and designers of acoustic environment design.