Experimental study on applicability of sound masking system in medical examination room

Recently, speech privacy to avoid oral information leakage in healthcare facilities has become an important issue. This study investigated effectiveness of sound masking system in regard to masking efficiency, annoyance and its influence on speech conversation for medical examination rooms in an experimental approach. Considering actual application, two adjacent medical examination rooms partitioned by a low sound insulation wall in a typical healthcare facility were selected as an experimental field and sound masking system was temporally installed. In the rooms, acoustic environment was measured and reproduced in an anechoic room with a 3‐D sound field simulation system using a 6‐ch sound recording/reproduction technique. In the simulated acoustic condition, subjective tests were designed to quantify the masking efficiency and annoyance caused by the masking sound. The annoyance test was conducted in listening condition (with high attention to the sound) and in talking condition (with low attention). As a result, mixed maskers composed by water stream, synthesized speech signals, and steady state noise showed high performance in both aspect of masking efficiency and annoyance.