Speech Impaired by Half Masks Used for the Respiratory Tract Protection.

ABSTRACT: Filtering half masks belong to the group of personal protective equipment in the work environment. They protect the respiratory tract but may hinder breath and suppress speech. The present work is focused on the attenuation of sound by the half masks known as "filtering facepieces", FFPs, of various construction and filtration efficiency. Rather than study the perception of speech by humans, we used a generator of white noise and artificial speech to obtain objective characteristics of the attenuation. The generator speaker was either covered by an FFP or remained uncovered while a class 1 meter measured sound pressure levels in 1/3 octave bands with center frequencies 100-20 kHz at distances from 1 to 5 m from the speaker. All five FFPs suppressed acoustic waves from the octave bands with

SUBMITTER: Nowacki K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9222881 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature