Measuring Speech Intelligibility Reduction due to Face Masks
(Brief Report, by Daniele Ponteggia – 848kB Pdf)

While the global Covid-19 pandemic is in remission at this stage, the use of face masks can be expected from now on to be very common in a large number of applications.
Using a face mask makes verbal communication more difficult, the lack of visual cues is one of the reasons but, above all, the mask has an important influence on sound propagation.

We were curious about quantifying the intelligibility loss when wearing a face mask. A brief bibliography research found many recent articles about the impact of Personal Protecting Equipment PPE on speech intelligibility, but few articles with Speech Transmission Index STI measured data.

We decided to investigate further using our CLIO 12.5 system which can measure the STI with both direct and indirect method.

Please read our short report available here:

Measuring Speech Intelligibility Reduction due to Face Masks
(Brief Report, by Daniele Ponteggia – 848kB Pdf)