A Study on the Redesign of Hospital Outpatient Halls Based on Acoustic Environment Requirements

Abstract

The acoustic design of outpatient halls is often ignored, yet the acoustic environment significantly impacts patients’ physical and mental well-being as well as their visit experience. This paper takes the outpatient hall of a hospital in South China as a case, employs in-situ acoustic measurement, and conducts a quantitative analysis of its indoor acoustic environment through acoustic simulation. The in-situ measurements show that the noise level, speech intelligibility and reverberation time in the hall all fail to meet standard requirements. The poor acoustic quality is mainly due to the lack of acoustic design. Consequently, this study proposes measures to improve the outpatient hall’s acoustic environment from two aspects, namely sound absorption and building form design. These measures include sound absorption treatment, adjustment of the hall’s floor height and optimization of planar length-to-width ratio. The redesigned outpatient hall plan demonstrates an evident enhancement in acoustic quality and validates the effectiveness of the proposed redesign strategy. This study can provide practical guidance for the design and acoustic renovation of healthcare buildings and can also offer new insights for the redesign of hospital outpatient halls from the perspective of improving the acoustic environments.