Sounds Asleep - Towards better sleep quality with biometric noise metering and mediation

Lead Research Organisation: University of York
Department Name: Electronics

Abstract

Noise can have a significant impact on health and wellbeing, including cardiovascular health, sleep disruption, working cognition, and cumulative hearing damage. Many people in the UK describe their environment as excessively noisy, a significant proportion of the UK population is dissatisfied with their auditory environment (~30%) and sleep disruption in the home environment has been shown to affect both mental and physical health. Noise measures are not readily interpreted by non-specialist audiences, and therefore tend not to encourage proactive adoption by the public. New metrics may help to empower people dealing with noise and interrupted sleep. Advances in affordable, comfortable biophysiological sensors suggest a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between existing acoustic measurement, self-reported responses such as annoyance, and biophysiological measures, creating new, consolidated metrics for noise measurement.

This project will also represent the first step towards the possibility of using biofeedback to facilitate noise masking using automated soundscape generation. Individually-adaptive soundscape masking may be effective in mediating the impact of noise - the user would optimally remain in a quality state of sleep while the system responds autonomously. Machine learning can provide a way to use complex combinations of biofeedback as useful control signals for soundscape generation. Such techniques require a large amount of data and mass market wearables are now reaching a level of maturity which can facilitate such experiments.

Publications

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Studentship Projects

Project Reference Relationship Related To Start End Student Name
EP/R513386/1 01/10/2018 31/12/2023
2163424 Studentship EP/R513386/1 01/01/2019 30/04/2022 Simon Durbridge
 
Description We have been studying ways to evaluate soundscapes in the laboratory, attempting to apply soundscape assessment methods under controlled conditions.
Participants in these studies are asked to identify the quality of the soundscape and how the soundscape left them feeling.
One goal of this research was to use physiological measures to asses if the homeostasis of participants varied with their survey responses.
Several theories link changes in physiological measures such as heart rate and the amount of sweat present on the hands to the emotional state of an individual, and we were interested in identifying if evidence of those theories can be obbserved in the context of soundscape.
Initial attempts at this work were impeded by poor quality and inconsistent physiological data.
We improved the experimental methodology and improved the physiological sensor we were using, reducing the number of physiological measures we were taking to only include heart rate.
Although we found that participants reported experiencing different states of affect when experiencing a variety of soundscape recordings, were unsuccessful in identifying the effects of experiencing different soundscapes in heart rate measurements.
The results of our experiments so far suggest that the effect size of soundscape experience on the heart rate of participants is too small to be measured by the sample size used in our work.
Key challenge in further work include both improving the effect size of the experiment and having more participants take part in the experiments.
We have identified that the ecological validity of the experiment may have a key influence in the responses of participants to soundscapes.
We wish to further explore if improving the immersion and sense of presence in the experimental environment leads to differing results to those in our published research.
To this end, we have identified a toolset and developed a software framework for performing environment evaluation using soundscape methods using head mounted displays.
Experimental work using this framework and toolset is ongoing.
The work described above has required the development of skills in software development and game engine design, as well as statistics and experimental methods.
Exploitation Route Environmental policy is a fulcrum around which society improves and safeguards peoples quality of life from the excess polution that occurs due to the continued development and urbanisation of our environment.
Environmental noise policy is first and foremost aimed towards governments and urban planners, motivating them to consider the quality of a space and improve upon it.
However, there are many challenges in the assessment of environmental noise.
These include how to augment the assessment of environmental noise by including a human factor through the use of studies and surveys, and how to assess the quality of environments before they are built.
Our findings and outcomes are aimed at those who are focussed on cultivating soundscape as a methodology for the evaluation of urban environments in controlled conditions.
In our publications we have exposed and discussed key considerations in the further development of environment evaluation strategies.
Our work can be taken as a basis for further development of soundscape evaluation in virtual worlds.
Further, we have highlighted challenges in the use of physiological measures in soundscape evaluation, and researchers can learn from our mistakes in future works that aim to resolve a psychophysiological basis for soundscape evaluation.
Sectors Construction,Environment