Recent literature reports that a large percentage of teachers complain that teaching has an adverse effect on their voice status. Thus, more needs to be done to study their vocal behavior. The objective of this longitudinal study was twofold: to determine changes in the voice use of teachers over a school year, and to study the relationships between voice use and classroom acoustic parameters. Thirty-one teachers from two secondary schools in Turin (Italy) were involved at the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year, and 22 of them also participated at the end of the same school year. The results show that teachers adjust their voices with noise and reverberation. A minimum value of the sound pressure level of voice (SPL) was found at a mid-frequency reverberation time of 0.8 s in both periods. Moreover, the teachers who worked in the worst classroom acoustic conditions showed an increase of 2.3 dB in the mean SPL and a decrease of 10% in the voicing time percentage at the end of the school year. A predictive model that can be used to estimate the mean SPL from the background noise level and the reverberation time, based on collected data, is here proposed.

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This longitudinal work explores the relationships between three analyses used for assessing teachers’ voice use: the voice monitoring during lessons that describes the teachers’ Vocal Behavior (VB), the perceptual assessment of voice by speech-language pathologists and the estimation of objective parameters from vocalizations to define teachers’ Vocal Performance (VP). About 30 Italian teachers from secondary schools were involved at the beginning and at the end of a school year. In each period, teachers’ vocal activity was monitored using the Voice Care device, which acquires the voice signal through a contact microphone fixed at the neck to estimate sound pressure level, fundamental frequency, and voicing time percentage. Once in each period, two speech-language pathologists performed a perceptual assessment of teachers’ voice using the GIRBAS-scale. On that occasion, teachers vocalized a sustained vowel standing in front of a sound level meter in a quiet room. Jitter, Shimmer and other parameters were extracted using Praat, while a new metric of Cepstral-Peak-Prominance-Smoothed was estimated with a MATLAB script. Several relationships between the outcomes of each analysis were investigated, e.g., statistical differences between the dimension “G” from GIRBAS-scale and objective measures for VB and VP, and correlations between objective measures and perceptual ratings were assessed.

Recently, in many fields related to environmental quality, such as thermal and visual quality, the tendency is to customize the comfort according to the user’s needs. A tailored comfort zone is planned in public spaces, in which occupants can set their own comfort level with passive or active systems. In this context, the reduction of noise due to anthropic sources can be seen as a priority. In densely occupied spaces, such as classrooms, workplaces, restaurants, and outdoor spaces, the noise due to users chatting has a detrimental effect upon performance, health, and environmental quality. This study reports applications of S&N-S Light, Speech & Noise Stop-Light, a patented smart phonometric device with a warning light activation of exceeding of predetermined anthropic sound levels limits, which encourages personal voice control through visual feedback. The light activation, with green, yellow, and red color, is based on an adaptive algorithm that accounts for pre-defined statistical noise levels; therefore, accidental noise levels can be filtered. The device has been used in classrooms, restaurants, and urban squares. Results indicate a decrease of noise levels with S&N-S Light, especially when the occupants received training about the device benefits.

Hypercholesterolemia is associated with the atherosclerotic process and cardiovascular disease from childhood, thus introducing the need of an early prevention. The dietary approach is the treatment cornerstone but sometimes is unsuccessful to reach the lipoprotein optimal target. Furthermore, drugs like statins have limited use in childhood as their administration is limited to high risk children. The effects of nutraceuticals are known in adults and considered useful in children to overcome this therapy gap. In the present paper a review of pediatric experiences from fiber, phytosterols and RYR handing out is considered.