Interaction between Sound and Thermal Influences on Patient Comfort in the Hospitals of China’s Northern Heating Region

Abstract

Previous studies have found that hospitals are often inadequately ventilated in the heating region of China, which causes an increased risk of negative impacts on patients. The complex interaction between thermal comfort and acoustics presents considerable challenges for designers. There is a wide range of literature covering the area of the interaction between the sound–thermal, sound–odor, and acoustic–visual influences, but a focused research on the sound –thermal influence on comfort in hospitals has not been published yet. This paper describes a series of field measurements and subjective evaluations that investigate the thermal comfort and acoustic performance of eighteen hospitals in China. The results showed that the thermal comfort in the monitored wards was mostly acceptable, but the temperatures tended to be much higher and the humidity much lower, in practice than they were designed to be in the heating season. The most significant conclusion is that a positive thermal stimulus can create a comfortable thermal environment, which can improve patients’ evaluation of the acoustics, while a negative stimulus has the opposite effect. A comfortable acoustic environment also caused patients to positively evaluate thermal comfort. Moreover, the relationship between thermal and sound effects in the overall evaluation showed that they are almost equal.