A design of control signal in reducing discomfort of the dental treatment sound based on auditory masking

In dental treatment, patients feel a strong discomfort feeling by the treatment sounds which arise by a tooth grinding. In order to add comfort to quality of life, we aim to reduce the discomfort feeling with dental treatment sounds. We previously proposed the unpleasantness reduction method based on auditory masking to reduce discomfort feeling of noise. The previously proposed method can reduce discomfort feeling by emitting a control signal to a listener, but we had focused on unpleasantness reduction to noise which has a peak frequency. Meanwhile, dental treatment sounds tend to consist of multiple spectral peaks. Therefore, in the present paper, we propose the design method of control signals for reducing discomfort feeling of dental treatment sounds which have multiple spectral peaks. More specifically, we detect the main spectral peaks which bring a discomfort feeling, and design the control signal which can mask these spectral peaks. Also, we employ the sound of running water as a source for the control signal. We carried out subjective evaluation experiments to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. As a result of evaluation experiments, we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.