An acoustic design to reduce patient discomfort during dental treatment by using a multi-band filter and auditory masking

Abstract

Delayed dental check-ups of patients due to dental noise concerns could lead to serious complications. Several previous studies focused on controlling and reducing the noise of specific devices such as dental handpieces. In that research, they mostly used passive or active noise-reduction headphones to reduce the dental handpiece noise. The limitation of this method is the headphones can hurt the patients’ ears if their size does not fit the patients or the patients must wear them for a long time of surgery. Furthermore, it is difficult to control and reduce dental handpiece noise because it is a signal that has high frequency and various directions. Not only the noise of the handpiece but also the noise of other instruments such as scalers, air or water syringes, and suctions can also cause discomfort to the listener because they also have high frequencies. Especially, when the sounds of these devices combine during the treatment process (e.g., scaler and water syringe noise in scrape tartar treatment), it will create a more complex sound with more frequency peaks that need to be processed compared with previous studies that focus only on the noise of some specific dental device. To solve the mentioned problems, my thesis is acoustic designs based on a multi-band filter and auditory masking which can reduce patient discomfort during types of dental treatment. We measured the dental treatment noise from patients with different types of dental devices. Then, the auditory masking methods were applied to reduce the impact of this noise on the listener. We ensure ii our methods' reliability and good performance by evaluating our sound designs with 20 independent participants. The feeling of patients when applying the auditory masking is significantly better than the original dental noise.