Light-alerting Personal Noise Dosimeter - PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
Occupational noise is a widespread risk factor strongly linked to critical health hazards such as hearing loss,
psychiatric disorders, increased blood pressure, and harmful biochemical, immune system, and birth-weight
effects. In the United States, every year more than 30 million workers are exposed to hazardous noise levels,
including 76% of mine workers. One in four of these workers (or 7.5 million Americans) will develop permanent
hearing loss. Noise-related hearing loss has been listed as one of the most prevalent occupational health
concerns for more than 25 years [1]. Four out of five mine workers have a hearing impairment when they reach
retirement age [2]. Existing noise dosimeters are expensive and cannot effectively alert users when a noise
hazard occurs because they either lack a noise hazard indicator within the user’s visual field or they do not have
an indicator. To address this problem, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes, in Phase II, to advance the
development of our new Light-Alerting Personal Noise Dosimeter (LAND) system, which was prototyped and
proven feasible in Phase I. The LAND is an inexpensive, smartphone-based noise dosimeter with an alerting
feature that fills the existing gap in prevention of noise-related hearing impairment/loss in the U.S. workforce.
LAND alerts a worker of a noise hazard via vibration and light signals placed in the worker’s visual field, thus the
alerts cannot be missed by workers at any time during their workday. LAND provides accurate measurement of
noise parameters inside and/or in proximity of the ear and performance of hearing protection devices in real time.
In addition, LAND, for the first time, provides users with information about the maximal time they can spend in
hazardous area. Use of commercial smartphone will make LAND affordable for widespread acceptance. These
advantages make the LAND commercially attractive. LAND is designed to meet Mine Safety and Health
Administration (MSHA) electrical safety regulations for coal mine environments. The potential markets for the
proposed LAND include the mining and construction industries, transportation and military sectors, as well as
bars, restaurants, and concert halls. As a result, POC’s proposed research will significantly and positively impact
the hearing conservation program. In Phase I, POC successfully demonstrated the feasibility of the LAND system
with a scaled-down prototype culminating in third-party testing at Odin Metrology, Inc. (Thousand Oaks, CA).
LAND is flexible and convenient in use. It accurately measures noise exposure, provide efficient hazard alerts,
and have small size, weight, power, and cost. We also determined the market for the LAND. The goal of Phase
II is to develop and demonstrate a full-scale prototype system that is completely safe for mine use. Successful
development of this technology will result in an entirely new low-cost noise dosimeter system that will provide
both noise measurement and real-time user alerting, thus it can be widely adopted to address this pervasive
problem, preventing hearing loss and other environmental noise-related afflictions while reducing the cost of
conducting noise surveys and hearing conservation programs.
