Disposable Surgical Mask Helps Teach Students With Hearing Challenges

Wearing disposable surgical mask offers best acoustic performance yet maintaining the protection against COVID-19 when it comes to teaching students with hearing loss.

Wearing masks during this pandemic remains one of the effective methods in slowing down the spread of COVID-19. Although the habit fits quite well in various settings, this may add hindrance when it comes to a profession of teaching the students with hearing loss.

To address the often forsaken issue, scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign tested various medical masks, disposable surgical masks, masks with clear plastic windows around the mouth, and homemade and store-bought cloth masks made of different fabric types and numbers of layers.

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‘Wearing disposable surgical mask offers best acoustic performance yet maintaining the protection against COVID-19 when it comes to teaching students with hearing loss. Most masks also offer amplification of voices using microphones which can be utilized in settings like classrooms. ’

It was seen that disposable surgical masks were set best for being heard clearly when speaking, as published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Disposable mask offers better acoustic performance:

"Previous research performed on this subject has focused on medical masks worn in health care settings. But no one has looked at the acoustic effects caused by different kinds of fabric masks, so that's where I focused our study", says Ryan Corey, an electrical and computer engineering lead postdoctoral researcher under Professor Andrew Singer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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The researchers collected data using a specially designed loudspeaker with voice shaped like that from a human mouth and also from a mask-wearing human speaker.

"Using a real person makes the sounds less repeatable because we can't say the same thing the same way every time. However, it does let us account for the real shape of the head and real movements of lips. Even though these two data sets are a bit different, they both show which sound frequencies are most affected by mask-wearing and which masks have the strongest effects", says Corey.

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The data showed that all masks including clear-window masks muffle the quiet, high-frequency sound generated when a person pronounces consonants – a pre-existing challenge for those with hearing loss. Also blocking of visual cues like facial expression and lip motion was seen.

The study found that among the masks with proper protection against respiratory droplets of COVID-19, disposable surgical masks offer the best acoustic performance.

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The team also showed that most masks do not completely block sound; they simply deflect it away from the mouth. This means that simple amplification devices like lapel microphones can make masked speech more accessible to everyone, especially if used in settings like classrooms and lecture halls.

Source-Medindia