A preliminary study of noise effect on pulse rate, blood pressure and EEG signal

Abstract

This paper presents the effect of noise to pulse rate, blood pressure and Encephalography (EEG) signal. The investigation aims to find the correlation between noise exposures to pulse rate (PR), blood pressure (BP) and EEG signal. A total of 20 subjects (all male) with age range of 20-22 years old and no past medical history were studied. Subjects were exposed to noise at 90 dB for ten minutes. Noise at 90dB was generated by using INTERM M500 Power Amplifier (INTERM M500, Cunnings, UK). Pulse rate, blood pressure and EEG signal were recorded before and after noise exposure. UT 4000A Patient Monitor (UT 400A; Progetti, Italy) was used to record pulse rate and blood pressure during the experiment. EEG signals were captured by using PowerLab 4/25T Data Acquisition Systems (ML865; ADInstruments, Canada). This system is capable to classify the EEG signal into Alpha (8-12 Hz) and Beta (13-30 Hz). Statistical analysis was conducted by using SPSS Version 16 (SPSS Inc; Chicago, USA) to find the correlation between noise to pulse rate, blood pressure and Power Spectral Density (PSD) value for Alpha and Beta waves. The result shows that pulse rate and blood pressure increase after noise xposure. Besides that, the finding showed that there are significant positive difference (p<0.05) between the mean value of alpha’s and beta’s PSD before and after noise exposure.