Impact of face masks and shield protection on vocal effort of speaking person

While on one hand wearing face masks can provide protection against infection from various viruses, on the other hand, it can have a negative effect on communication between people. Often reported is the reduced speech intelligibility, which is cause due to filtering effects of masks and reduced possibility of humans to read from lips. In this paper, besides the filtering effects, also the impact of mask/shield on the vocal effort of people is investigated. First experiments involved two main scenarios in which the filtering effect was observed and evaluated: (1) assessment of speech signal transmitted through conventional masks, based on experiments on people; (2) analysis of the sound signal produced by home-made artificial head. Later, the effect of the increased speech effort due to face mask was investigated by means of vibrometry measurement using an accelerometer placed at the suprasternal notch. The obtained data confirmed that the speech effort of the speaker is influenced by the attenuated perception of speech by speaker caused by the facemask. While the speech attenuation caused by facemask is partly dependent on the shape of the face and facial movements caused by the articulation effort, the impact on the attenuation perception is also rather individual.