Recently there has been an increasing interest in the acoustic environment and its perceptual counterpart (i.e., the soundscape) of care facilities and their potential to affect the experience of residents with dementia. There is evidence that too loud sounds or poor soundscape quality more generally can affect negatively the quality of life of people with dementia and increase agitation. The AcustiCare project aims to use the soundscape approach to enhance the Quality of Life (QoL) of residents and to reduce Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia (BPSD), as well as improving the everyday experience of nursing homes for both residents and staff members. In order to gain further insights into the sound environments of such facilities, sound level monitoring and soundscape data collection campaigns were conducted in the living rooms of five nursing homes in Flanders. Results showed that sound levels (dB) and loudness levels (sone) did not vary significantly between days of the week, but they did so between moments of the day and between living rooms. From the perceptual point of view, several soundscape attributes and the perceived prominence of different sound source types varied significantly between the living rooms investigated, and a positive correlation was found between sound levels and the number of persons present in the living rooms. These findings claim for further attention on the potential role of the sound domain in nursing homes, which should promote (and not only permit) better living and working conditions for residents and staff members of nursing homes.

Sound and its resulting soundscape is a major appraisal component of the living environment. Where environmental sounds (e.g., outdoor traffic sounds) are often perceived as negative, a soundscape (e.g., containing natural sounds) can also have a positive effect on health and well-being. This supportive effect of a soundscape is getting increasing attention for use in practice. This paper addresses the design of a supportive sonic environment for persons with dementia in nursing homes. Starting from a review of key mechanisms related to sonic perception, cognitive deficits and related behavior, a framework is derived for the composition of a sonic environment for persons with dementia. The proposed framework is centered around using acoustic stimuli for influencing mood, stimulating the feeling of safety and triggering a response in a person. These stimuli are intended to be deployed as added sounds in a nursing home to improve the well-being and behavior of the residents.

The poultry industry relies on highly efficient production systems. For sustainable food production, where maintaining broiler welfare is crucial, it is essential to have robust data collection systems and automated methods for assessing broiler health and welfare. This paper presents the development and implementation of an acoustic system designed to detect and differentiate between four distinct vocalizations of broiler chickens-pleasure notes, distress calls, short peeps, and warbles-while filtering out background noise and other vocalizations. The vocalization detector is designed as a convolutional neural network with 11 two-dimensional convolutional layers and one one-dimensional convolutional layer. For training, a manually labeled vocalization library was built (>2k samples, with a total duration of 190 minutes), based on a large set of continuous audio recordings of ten male Ross 308 broiler chicks aged from 1 to 36 days. An extension with a subset of the AudioSet dataset was made to include background sounds. With this library, an overall balanced accuracy of 91.1 % was achieved by the neural network-based recognizer.

Sound analysis of animal vocalizations may provide valuable insights into their emotional state and behavioral responses to environmental stimuli. In broiler chickens, four primary vocalization types-distress calls (DC), short peeps (SP), warbles (W), and pleasure notes (PN)-are well-characterized through sound analysis. The objective of this study was to identify the normal vocalization patterns of broiler chickens throughout the on-farm stage, considering different times of the day (morning, midday, afternoon, and night), and to assess the effects of heat stress (HS) and multifunctional elevated platforms (MP) enrichment on these patterns. The trial included 1,680 male Ross 308 chickens, housed under either thermoneutral or HS conditions during the final two weeks, with half the pens enriched with MP. DC, SP, PN, and W were automatically monitored using custom-build broiler vocalization recognizer. When a vocalization did not fit one of the four categories, it was classified as another type of vocalization (OV). Time of day significantly influenced SP, DC, W, and PN. Throughout the starter, grower, and finisher phases, all treatments exhibited similar vocalization patterns across age and time of the day, highlighting the strong influence of daily periods on vocalizations. SP had the highest frequency in the evening and the lowest at night. DC peaked at midday, while W reached its highest frequency at night and was least frequent at midday. PN were most common at night but significantly lower during midday and evening. SP and DC were the most prevalent vocalizations, while PN occurred less frequently and were most prominent in broilers of 1 week old. W remained consistently low throughout the broilers' lifespan. DC, SP, and OV increased with age, whereas PN declined, indicating a shift and more diverse vocal communication patterns as broilers mature. The presence of MP and HS did not influence vocalization patterns. These results demonstrate significant changes in vocalization patterns with age and time of the day throughout the on-farm cycle, while remaining relatively unaffected by the presence of MP or HS.

Acoustic comfort is becoming an increasingly important dimension for practitioners in the context of design of care facilities for older adults, namely nursing homes. Defining the quality of these spaces based on room acoustics criteria alone might be challenging if aspects related to their functioning (e.g., speech-based activities) are not taken into account. The acoustical capacity concept has been previously proposed for eating establishments as a way to provide a quality assessment based on both physical characteristics of the space and the perceived quality of verbal communication. In this study, a revised version of a prediction model for ambient noise levels based on occupancy and an estimation of acoustical capacity are proposed for nursing homes hosting people with dementia, and the corresponding parameters of slope, group size and absorption per person are optimized for the specific application, using a Nursing Home in Flanders (Belgium) participating to the AcustiCare project as case study. Results show that, compared to normal eating establishments, lower absorption per person values and higher group size values should be used in nursing homes to reduce errors in ambient noise levels prediction. Furthermore, using a retrofit intervention carried out in the living room of the Nursing Home, the enhanced acoustical capacity of the space was analysed. Results, in this case, show that, prior to the retrofit intervention, the acoustical capacity was already exceeded with average occupancy (i.e., saturated in normal functioning conditions), while the reduction in reverberation time achieved with the retrofit increased considerably the acoustical capacity of the space, shifting the quality of verbal communication in the living room from insufficient to satisfactory.

Broiler vocalizations may contain relevant information about the welfare and health status; however, there is limited information on how disease affects vocal patterns. This study aimed 1) to investigate whether specific vocalization changes emerge in response to two important poultry diseases: intestinal (Eimeria spp.) and respiratory (infectious bronchitis virus, IBV; combined with avian pathogenic Escherichia coli, APEC), and 2) to characterize changes in broiler chicken vocalizations over age (14-41 days of age), and across time of the day (morning: 6:00 AM-12:00 PM; afternoon: 12:00 PM-6:00 PM; evening: 6:00 PM-12:00 AM; night: 12:00 AM-6:00 AM). Vocalizations were monitored using an automated AI-based broiler vocalization detector previously developed by our group. A total of 176 Ross 308 broilers were included across four experimental rounds, each consisting of three treatments (control and the two disease challenges) with four replicates each of 11 birds per group. Groups were housed in 3 m² pens and continuously recorded from day 14 to day 41 using centrally mounted microphones. Disease challenges were administered on day 14 (Eimeria spp.) and day 21 (IBV followed by APEC on day 24). Audio recordings were analyzed using a convolutional neural network trained to detect five vocalization categories: distress calls (DC), short peeps (SP), pleasure notes (PN), warbles (W), and other vocalizations (OV). Vocalizations were aggregated hourly to be evaluated across treatments, age and time of the day. Statistical analyses were performed using mixed-effects models in SAS (PROC MIXED). No significant effects of treatment were detected for all vocalization types (p > 0.05). However, significant age-related changes in vocal expression were observed (p < 0.05), with DC, SP, and PN decreasing progressively over age, while OV increased. Also, DC, SP, and OV were less frequent during the night from 14 to 28 days of age when compared to the other times of the day (p < 0.05), indicating that vocal expression was primarily driven by age- and diurnal period-related changes rather than experimental disease challenge. These results highlight both the potential of vocalization patterns baselines to better understand broilers vocal behavior and current limitations of acoustic monitoring for detecting health disturbances in broiler chickens.