Impact noise annoyance amongst seniors aging in place

The demographics of countries such as Canada and Japan continue to shift to a higher percentage of seniors and many of those seniors prefer to age in place in their own homes or communities. An important aspect of aging in place includes staying healthy and the acoustic environment of the dwelling plays a role. The preference to age in place coupled with increasing densification of city centers means that many people will be aging in place in multi-tenancy dwellings. Different people show different degrees of annoyance due to neighbor noise, especially impact noise and it is desirable to include limits on impact noise that consider those aging in place in the acoustic requirements of building codes. This paper describes a collaboration between the National Research Council Canada and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and the Building Research Institute of Japan to evaluate the living comfort of the acoustical environment for the elderly population. The study will evaluate the subjective annoyance of elderly participants. Early investigations will also focus on the use of headphones versus loudspeaker arrays in listening rooms as well as the use of virtual reality headsets. The results of the evaluations are expected to reveal the acoustic properties related to annoyance due to impact noise and to create an evaluation framework of a part of sound quality of residential dwellings.