All over the world, acoustic standards and guidelines are often lacking in healthcare facilities. If an acoustic standard or regulation does exist, room acoustics are normally evaluated on reverberation time (RT) only, despite the fact that humans are known to perceive much more.

For many years, a wealth of research and theoretical studies have shown that RT alone can be insufficient to describe the acoustic conditions in non-diffuse environments, particularly in healthcare facilities and learning environments where the majority of absorption is on one surface.

Acoustics are of particular importance to people with dementia, who suffer from cognitive deficits and react to noise in a different way to others. They often have a hearing-impairment and this, together with the dementia, can lead to confusion, distraction and problems with orientation – all due to sound. These can also lead to social isolation because a person with dementia finds it hard to deal with noise. Further research shows that physiological reactions to sound – irrespective of age – can also increase heart rate and blood pressure, and result in heavy fatigue.

This paper will present the latest knowledge on room acoustics in relation to the elderly and how sound affects people in healthcare facilities in general. It will also present an intervention study from a dementia clinic in Munich, where three rooms were acoustically refurbished with different products and solutions. The objective of the study was to measure and analyse relevant room acoustic descriptors (reverberation time, Clarity (C50), Definition (D50), Speech Transmission Index), and determine whether the changes had an impact on patient behaviour and/or an effect on staff members.

Interviews and measurements were conducted before and after the refurbishments, and a delayed post-test, involving staff interviews, was carried out in September 2016.