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Abstract
Objective
The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of surgical masks and face shields on speech intelligibility of adults with moderate to severe hearing loss.
Design
This study measured speech tracking scores in quiet for life speech in three different conditions: without a mask, with a surgical mask and with a face shield. Acoustic effects of the masks and face shields on the speech signal were also investigated. Study sample: The study sample consists of 42 patients with moderate to severe hearing loss, 23 cochlear implant users and 19 hearing aid users.
Results
A significant average difference in speech perception scores was found for the use of a surgical mask compared to the listening situation “without mask”. The worse the speech understanding in quiet, the larger the impact of the surgical mask. For the worse performers even the face shield had a negative impact on speech perception. The sound distortion for the face shield compared to the surgical mask was greater.
Conclusion
This study shows that even for speech perception in quiet, surgical face masks, and face shields to a lesser extent, have a negative effect for patients with moderate to severe hearing loss.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Barbara van Oel and Debbie Smit for performing all tests and Geert Geleijnse for supporting the measurements of the acoustic effects of the surgical masks and face shields.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).