Faital, with over fifty years of experience in the acoustic field, is a group dedicated to supporting a very important scientific project conducted by the Neonatal Unit and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (Unità Operativa di Neonatologia e Terapia Intensiva) at Mangiagalli Clinic and AISTMAR Onlus (Italian Association for the Study and Care of High Risk Maternity).
It has been called “project TINpano” and focuses on Neonatal Intensive Care at the Mangiagalli Clinic of Milan – the largest in Italy and one of the most extensive in Europe.
Every year, about 900 infants with various pathologies are treated here, for the most part in cases of preterm or seriously premature births.
The research starts from the opinion of the scientific community that noise pollution in TIN should be measured, monitored and contained in order to reduce the discomfort for all babies to a minimum, as the little patients may have to stay for many hours, days or even several months.
The macro-stages of the study in this project are presented in three points:
a) Analysis of the current conditions, with monitoring of environmental noise on one end and measurement of the reduction guaranteed by current incubators on the other;
b) Then, suggestions will be made for implementing technical and operational countermeasures aimed at containing the noise emissions due to machinery, medical staff and presence of parents in the ward. At this stage, on one hand, appropriate architectural and structural countermeasures to achieve maximum absorption and acoustic control of the environment will be proposed; on the other, technical countermeasures will be suggested to incubator manufacturers in order to adjust and maximize the protection offered by their own products in a concrete manner.
c) The final stage of the project plans for the synthesis of the results obtained and the publication of the scientific research related to the project.
Faital is directly involved, from the very first stages of this research project, in the measurements of the frequency reduction capacities guaranteed by the three most widely used incubators models. The analysis were carried out in the anechoic chambers within the Faital Research & Development center in San Donato Milanese, Milan.
The second stage of the project, which yet again foresees the direct involvement and support of Faital, plans for the possibility of studying a system for active noise elimination and subsequent implementation within the incubators.
Even at this stage, Faital will be able to provide an essential contribution by pouring in the competence developed in over half a century of activity and derived from the design and manufacture of loudspeakers for the automotive field -where the active elimination of noise is a consolidated fact. Here, the cooperation of the incubator manufacturers will be requested for the practical application.
In this segment of applied research, Faital offers to openly cooperate with other groups or individuals that operate in the electronics field.
The first stage of the research which, as said, contemplates the analysis, monitoring and measurement of the noise currently in the environment and also in the reduction guaranteed by the existing incubators was completed at the Faital headquarters in the first fifteen days of July 2012.
The stage immediately following the “post-processing” for elaboration of the results involved the second half (fifteen days) of July 2012.
More in-depth:
The Neonatal Intensive Care environment is subject to a well-known setting that is very difficult to eliminate: on one hand, a state of absolute silence to best simulate prenatal conditions would be desirable; on the other, the need for constant assistance, therefore the important presence of staff and parents, machinery, monitoring systems and relative alarms create the conditions that are structurally not engineered to be silent.
It is common opinion that noise pollution in TIN should be measured, controlled and contained in order to reduce discomfort to a minimum for all of those who have to stay there for many hours: the little patients, first of all, who are evidently more vulnerable and sensible to any outside stimuli not contemplated by their own gestational age; but the staff operating in the unit would also receive benefit from a reduction in noise pollution, not just for the evident advantages in terms of environmental comfort. It is a known fact that the exposure to persistent noise pollution is a source of fatigue and loss of concentration, conditions that are certainly not desirable for the delicate operations required by the staff.
Finally, even parents, present –generally for many hours on end in the ward – and often in very delicate psychophysical conditions, could benefit from the reduction of their own level of stress, with consequent advantages for themselves as well as for the parent child relationship.
The delicate conditions of the little patients need additional consideration, as they are the only ones in the context to be exposed to the environmental noise of the TIN 24 hours a day and subject to a condition of acoustic stress that could be difficult to tolerate for an adult, even considering the important ability to screen insignificant, recurring noises by a brain trained to reason.
In conclusion, conditions that could be considered amply tolerable for a few hours of exposure, could not be so for a preterm newborn that could have to spend a few months in TIN and post-TIN.
