Hearing Protection as an Occupational Safety Measure

Hearing Protection as an Occupational Safety Measure The auditory canal is very sensitive to loud noise. Continuous exposure to the same may lead to health concerns such as high blood pressure, migraines, headaches psychological disorders and even hearing impairment. Most of the workforce from the manufacturing industries, construction sites and airports complain of such health issues.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) require enterprises of these industry sectors to ensure noise reduction at the worksites through permanent solutions or temporarily with the use of hearing protection devices. Such devices would help to protect the employees from damage of their ear drums. However, providing with the right hearing protection devices is a challenge faced by many enterprises in the manufacturing, quarrying sector as well as the armed forces.

Majority of soldiers in the war front, report of hearing losses due to exposure to gunshots and explosions as well as noise of heavy vehicles. The use of hearing loss prevention devices is very important to them but because of the inconvenience to their sight to detect and focus on enemy targets, they tend to avoid the use of hearing protection aids. The choice of the ear hearing protection devices vary from ear muffs to ear plugs. However, the performance of these devices depends most importantly on the size of acoustic leak. The providers of ear hearing protection devices have developed products with minimized acoustic leakage, leading to better performance.

Technological innovations in the field of design and development of hearing protection devices have led to the development of earplugs and safety earmuffs which provide the users not only with hearing protection but also meets the requirements for high noise communication solutions to be aware of the situation. Such high-end ear protection devices besides working like traditional ear protectors also facilitates speech and hearing while staying in loud noise environments.

The next generation ear hearing protection devices aids the workforce complete isolation from the loud noise environment while enabling clarity of hearing speech and two way communications in these environments. Further, reduction of the background noise to comfortable levels helps the users to recognize the original sounds and be aware of the surroundings. The two-way radio or Bluetooth communication allows for both short distance and long distance communication in high noise environments. Besides these features, these new age ear safety devices are dustproof and water-proof wit adjustable headbands and LCD displays indicating current channels of communication. Being a plug-and-play device these hearing protection devices are easy to operate.