Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2017 Oct 17;5(1):47.
doi: 10.1186/s40635-017-0162-1.

An experimental model to measure the ability of headphones with active noise control to reduce patient's exposure to noise in an intensive care unit

Stuart Gallacher  1 , Doyo Enki  2 , Sian Stevens  3 , Mark J Bennett  4
Affiliations

An experimental model to measure the ability of headphones with active noise control to reduce patient's exposure to noise in an intensive care unit

Stuart Gallacher et al. Intensive Care Med Exp. .

Abstract

Background: Defining the association between excessive noise in intensive care units, sleep disturbance and morbidity, including delirium, is confounded by the difficulty of implementing successful strategies to reduce patient's exposure to noise. Active noise control devices may prove to be useful adjuncts but there is currently little to quantify their ability to reduce noise in this complex environment.

Methods: Sound meters were embedded in the auditory meatus of three polystyrene model heads with no headphones (control), with headphones alone and with headphones using active noise control and placed in patient bays in a cardiac ICU. Ten days of recording sound levels at a frequency of 1 Hz were performed, and the noise levels in each group were compared using repeated measures MANOVA and subsequent pairwise testing.

Results: Multivariate testing demonstrated that there is a significant difference in the mean noise exposure levels between the three groups (p < 0.001). Subsequent pairwise testing between the three groups shows that the reduction in noise is greatest with headphones and active noise control. The mean reduction in noise exposure between the control and this group over 24 h is 6.8 (0.66) dB. The use of active noise control was also associated with a reduction in the exposure to high-intensity sound events over the course of the day.

Conclusions: The use of active noise cancellation, as delivered by noise-cancelling headphones, is associated with a significant reduction in noise exposure in our model of noise exposure in a cardiac ICU. This is the first study to look at the potential effectiveness of active noise control in adult patients in an intensive care environment and shows that active noise control is a candidate technology to reduce noise exposure levels the patients experience during stays on intensive care.

Keywords: Active noise control; Noise.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Not applicable

Consent for publication

Not applicable

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Three polystyrene model heads were placed on a firm shelf close to each other
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Mean sound level recorded in each hour of the day
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Overlapping histogram of the mean sound intensities
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
The per-minute variation in the reduction of noise levels over the course of 24 h between the three groups
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
The number of breaches above 60 dB per minute
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Box plots of the sound levels recorded in each of the three groups during the day and between 2200 and 0600
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Litton E, Carnegie V, Elliott R, Webb SA. The efficacy of earplugs as a sleep hygiene strategy for reducing delirium in the ICU: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Crit Care Med. 2016;44(5):992–999. doi: 10.1097/CCM.0000000000001557. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Thompson DR, Hamilton DK, Cadenhead CD, et al. Guidelines for intensive care unit design. Crit Care Med. 2012;40(5):1586–1600. doi: 10.1097/CCM.0b013e3182413bb2. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Valentin A, Ferdinande P. Improvement EWGoQ. Recommendations on basic requirements for intensive care units: structural and organizational aspects. Intensive Care Med. 2011;37(10):1575–1587. doi: 10.1007/s00134-011-2300-7. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Konkani A, Oakley B. Noise in hospital intensive care units—a critical review of a critical topic. J Crit Care. 2012;27(5):522 e521–522 e529. doi: 10.1016/j.jcrc.2011.09.003. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Hu R-F, Jiang X-Y, Chen J, et al (2015) Non-pharmacological interventions for sleep promotion in the intensive care unit. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 10:CD008808 - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources