FW-HTF-P: Wearable Adaptive Cognitive Assistance to Auditory Situational Awareness for Workers Exposed to Complex and Dynamic Noises

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This Future of Work at the Human Technology Frontier project will create intelligent hearing protection devices (HPDs) for workers in settings with hazardous noise volumes. Long-term exposure to high levels of noise can cause serious mental and physical health problems. However, hearing protection that simply blocks all sound also eliminates important safety cues, such as audible alarms. The resulting reduction in situational awareness can greatly increase the risk of serious industrial accidents. This project investigates a new wearable hearing protection technology that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to amplify safety-critical sounds and help locate their source, while greatly attenuating ambient noise. If successful, this project will enable the development of an AI-based HPD solution to preserve auditory situational awareness while providing comprehensive hearing protection. The result has the potential to improve job performance and safety, and minimize occupational hearing loss for the approximately 22 million U.S. workers that are exposed to hazardous noise levels each year, with the associated social and economic cost savings. It can be difficult to convince employers and workers to accept new wearable safety equipment. Thus, this project includes technological, psychological, and socioeconomic research components, to achieve a complete understanding of the factors controlling intelligent HPD adoption and deployment.This interdisciplinary project aims to advance the field of adaptive wearable augmented hearing protection technology. This planning project includes two thrusts. The first thrust entails identifying important design considerations, the potential impacts of human and environmental factors on aural sensing decision making, the needs and beliefs of key relevant actors (i.e., workers, business leaders, policymakers, and insurance agents) through a variety of engagement field visits, individual meetings, and focus groups. The second thrust entails the exploration of appropriate solutions by conducting a comprehensive literature review, a multidisciplinary workshop, and several pilot studies with construction workers, focusing on: i) AI-based sound recognition, ii) human-machine teaming for auditory situation awareness, and iii) socioeconomic modeling of using wearable safety technologies at work. This project will produce new knowledge about the needs and concerns of the user and other relevant stakeholders. The project will also generate new data for the development of computational semantics-based sound filtering models considering important human and work specific factors including auditory cognition, work complexity, biological individual differences in hearing, and human-machine teaming for aural comprehension. Further, this project will provide insights necessary to model the interrelationship between societal and economic perspectives of cognitive HPDs. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop the necessary research personnel, research infrastructure, and foundational work to expand the opportunities for studying future technology, future workers, and future work at the level of a FW-HTF full research proposal.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.