Development of a Hearing Health Monitoring Earplug for the Individual Assessment of a Human's Susceptibility to Develop Noise-Induced Hearing Loss

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The ongoing highly productive research collaboration between ÉTS and Sonomax Technologies has transformed best-practices in industrial hearing conservation. This new proposal, focused on hearing health monitoring, if successful, could generate ideas that will propel this partnership even further. A. OBJECTIVES OF THE PROPOSED RESEARCH PROGRAM Hearing Protection Devices (HPD) are used to protect most of the 30 million noised-exposed North-American workers against noise Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL). The objective of the proposed research program is to develop an HPD able to comfortably protect the worker and to continuously measure both the actual noise dose received and the induced auditory fatigue, taking into account the worker's own susceptibility to develop NIHL. B. TECHNOLOGICAL & SCIENTIFIC APPROACH To achieve these goals, two preliminary technologies will be developed: 1) A "dosimetric earplug" capable of monitoring the noise dose and warning both the user and his supervisor when the daily dose is about to be reached. 2) An "Otoacoustic Emissions monitoring earplug" that monitors cochlear responses and that could detect, for a given user, slight drifts in hearing levels much sooner than classical audiometric methods. The core scientific research is to study in real-time the relationship between noise exposure and auditory damage by combining the features of the two aforementioned devices. C. NOVELTY, SIGNIFICANCE AND EXPECTED BENEFITS This proposed research program will lead to the development of a very unique hearing-health monitoring HPD. From a scientific point of view, the proposed research program will contribute to improve fundamental knowledge of basic properties of the human auditory system, such as the individual auditory fatigue recovery rate or the individual "true" silence level below which the cochlea no longer accumulates doses.