Towards understanding healthy and supportive acoustic environments : the case of a nursing home

In elderly care a nursing home is a facility where on a residential basis different caring functions are taking place in order to satisfy the specific care needs of the residents. As in many outdoor and indoor situations, the soundscape of such a space, as originated form its acoustic environment, is of crucial importance since it has the potential to affect the behaviour of the residents. Apart from sounds originating from the care-related interactions between staff members and residents and other typical indoor sound sources like equipment noise, a major contribution to the acoustic environment in a nursing home can be the shouting of residents themselves. It is known that in case of residents with dementia, shouting behaviour can be a prevalent element of BPSD (behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia). Considering the supportive potential of a soundscape, its quality needs to be studied in view of these shouting events. Using signal processing techniques applied to datasets obtained in different nursing homes in Flanders these shouting events can be detected and allow to describe the shouting behaviour of a resident, the temporal pattern of which and its relation to the present soundscape is explored in this paper