Short report on the effects of SARS-CoV-2 face protective equipment on verbal communication

Abstract

Objective: To predict the impact of face personal protective equipment on verbal communication during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Design: We assessed the effect of common types and combinations of face personal protective equipment on speech intelligibility in quiet and in a simulated noisy environment.

Results: Wearing face personal protective equipment impairs transmission of middle-to-high voice frequencies and affects speech intelligibility. Surgical masks are responsible for up to 23.3% loss of speech intelligibility in noisy environments. The effects are larger in the condition of advanced face personal protective equipment, accounting for up to 69.0% reduction of speech intelligibility.

Conclusion: The use of face personal protective equipment causes significant verbal communication issues. Healthcare workers, school-aged children, and people affected by voice and hearing disorders may represent specific at-risk groups for impaired speech intelligibility.

Keywords: Background noise; COVID-19; Personal protective equipment; Speech intelligibility.

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE part of Springer Nature.

Figures

Fig. 1

a Face personal protective equipment (F-PPE) used for the test: ventilated FFP2 (upper left), ventilated FFP3 (lower left), face shield (middle), FFP2 (upper right), surgical mask (lower right), b testing set-up

Fig. 2

Full spectral analysis of speech signal from the uncovered loudspeaker and main frequency band level differences for face masks and face shield, alone and combined, in quiet

Fig. 3

Speech recognition of normal hearing subjects (solid line) and Speech Intelligibility Index (SII, dashed line) for face masks and face shield, alone and combined, at different levels of diffuse speech noise (dotted lines, reference values for the uncovered loudspeaker conditions)