Noise Mitigation using Facade Design on Indonesian Hospital : Dr. Soetomo General Hospital Case Study

Noise exposure in a hospital is known to have considerable impact not only to the healthy workers, but the ability for speedy recovery to the patients as well. However, the noise emission in a hospital tends to increase from year to year (Busch-Vishniac, et. al., 2005), including Dr. Soetomo General Hospital, serving more than 4,500 patients per day as of January 2017. Typically, Indonesian hospital noise emission sources are families of a patient stay overnight nearby the hospital ward (murmur), and utilities. In this paper, we present our recent study on fasade design to mitigate the noise emission at the Dr. Soetomo General Hospital. The aim is to investigate the noise characteristics of each individual source and to predict the effectiveness of fasade designed specifically for murmur to utilities noise. Firstly, we propose a new fasade design considering the effectiveness of reducing the murmur noise. The conversational noise is mainly at lower frequency regions compared to the utilities frequencies. The measurement results showed that the new fasade design was capable to reduce to 20 dB SPL from the current fasade. The results, however, suggest that the fasade is not suitable for higher frequency reduction for the utilities noise.