Comfort evaluation of hearing protection

Abstract Hearing protection is very important for workers in noisy work environments, although the willingness of workers to wear hearing protectors depends heavily on their comfort. This paper evaluates and recommends improvements for the comfort of hearing protection. Workers’ experience and comfort needs for hearing protection were investigated through a questionnaire that established the “comfort indices” for hearing protection. An earmuff “comfort tester” was designed to measure the comfort indices, and an experiment was conducted to measure workers’ perceived comfort into quantitative data. From the data, the range of these comfort indices in which workers will feel comfortable was determined. Finally, guidelines to improve the design of current hearing protection based on these “comfort indices” are proposed, which may help increase workers’ willingness to wear hearing protection. Relevance to industry Using these proposed guidelines may help improve the comfort of hearing protection and increase workers’ willingness to wear hearing protection in noisy work environments.