Sounds Asleep - Towards better sleep quality with biometric noise metering and mediation

噪音会对健康和福祉产生重大影响，包括心血管健康、睡眠中断、工作认知和累积听力损伤。许多英国人形容他们的环境过于嘈杂，相当大比例的英国人对他们的听觉环境不满意（约30%），家庭环境中的睡眠中断已被证明会影响心理和身体健康。非专业人士并不容易理解噪音措施，因此往往不鼓励公众主动采用。新的指标可能有助于人们应对噪音和睡眠中断。经济实惠、舒适的生物生理传感器的进步为探索现有声学测量、自我报告的反应（如烦恼）和生物生理测量之间的关系提供了一个独特的机会，为噪声测量创造了新的、统一的指标。该项目也将是朝着使用生物反馈来使用自动声景生成来促进噪声掩蔽的可能性迈出的第一步。个体自适应声景掩蔽可能有效地调节噪声的影响-当系统自主响应时，用户将最佳地保持在高质量的睡眠状态。机器学习可以提供一种方法，使用复杂的生物反馈组合作为声景生成的有用控制信号。这样的技术需要大量的数据，而大众市场的可穿戴设备现在已经达到了一个成熟的水平，可以促进这样的实验。

Noise can have a significant impact on health and wellbeing, including cardiovascular health, sleep disruption, working cognition, and cumulative hearing damage. Many people in the UK describe their environment as excessively noisy, a significant proportion of the UK population is dissatisfied with their auditory environment (~30%) and sleep disruption in the home environment has been shown to affect both mental and physical health. Noise measures are not readily interpreted by non-specialist audiences, and therefore tend not to encourage proactive adoption by the public. New metrics may help to empower people dealing with noise and interrupted sleep. Advances in affordable, comfortable biophysiological sensors suggest a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between existing acoustic measurement, self-reported responses such as annoyance, and biophysiological measures, creating new, consolidated metrics for noise measurement.This project will also represent the first step towards the possibility of using biofeedback to facilitate noise masking using automated soundscape generation. Individually-adaptive soundscape masking may be effective in mediating the impact of noise - the user would optimally remain in a quality state of sleep while the system responds autonomously. Machine learning can provide a way to use complex combinations of biofeedback as useful control signals for soundscape generation. Such techniques require a large amount of data and mass market wearables are now reaching a level of maturity which can facilitate such experiments.