Sound field of typical single-bed hospital wards

The aim of this paper is to investigate the basic characteristics of sound fields in the increasingly concerned single-bed hospital wards, the effects of commonly used furniture, and the feasibility and strategic use of acoustic simulation techniques for such spaces. Two typical single-bed wards at a Critical Care Unit were selected as the case study site. Eight different room acoustic conditions were created by gradually moving pieces of furniture out of the ward. It has been shown that in the ward without acoustic ceiling, under empty room condition the RT ranged from 0.8 s, typically at low frequency, to 2.3 s at 630 Hz; the variations in both SPL and RT at different receivers were insignificant except at low frequencies, so that in such single-bed wards a diffuse field could be assumed; and longer RT and higher SPL were found when furniture was gradually moved out of the ward. In the ward with acoustic ceiling, the effect of furniture was less. There was a good agreement between measured and simulated RT and SPL, showing the usefulness of computer simulation for this kind of spaces. In the simulation, the effect of surface diffusion coefficient was generally insignificant, whereas the effect of edge diffusion should be taken into account, especially for the RT prediction. The feasibility of geometric simplification was also demonstrated.