Bionic Ear Cuffs Could Stop Soldier Hearing Loss, Save VA Hospitals $1 Billion, with Mary Roach

Bionic Ear Cuffs Could Stop Soldier Hearing Loss, Save VA Hospitals $1 Billion,

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As Mary Roach, author of Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans in War states, the noise isn’t the biggest problem in the military, but the sudden volume change can be. If a person was to go in a helicopter, with the engine right under their ears and propellers going crazy right above, it’s easy to know that they’ll need some ear plugs to protect their hearing. It’s an obvious choice to make. In the military, it’s not so easy. A soldier may need to talk to the person sitting next to them in the helicopter. A conversation may be important.

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MARY ROACH:

Mary Roach grew up in a small house in Etna, New Hampshire. She graduated from Wesleyan in 1981, and then moved out to San Francisco. She spent a few years working as a freelance copy editor before landing a half-time PR job at the SF Zoo. During that time she wrote freelance articles for the local newspaper's Sunday magazine.

Though she mostly focuses on writing books, she writes the occasional magazine piece. These have run in Outside, National Geographic, New Scientist, Wired, and The New York Times Magazine, as well as many others. A 1995 article of herse called "How to Win at Germ Warfare" was a National Magazine Award Finalist, and in 1996, her article on earthquake-proof bamboo houses took the Engineering Journalism Award in the general interest magazine category. Mary Roach also reviews books for The New York Times.

Her first book, Stiff, was an offshoot of a column she wrote for Salon.com. Her other books include Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, and Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Mary Roach:  With a really loud noise like an M-16 is 160 dB and something that loud just a second or two or a split second worth of exposure can cause some hearing damage. Whereas if you're talking about like a noisy street, a loud restaurant, 85 dB, you could be exposed for eight hours before you'd start to run a risk. So it's a combination of how loud it is and how long you're exposed. So it's a huge problem in the military. It's the number one expense that the VA deals with. It's a billion dollars a year for hearing loss and tinnitus for hearing disabilities.

And you think well, duh, put in earplugs or ear cuffs. And that's great until you need to communicate; you need to hear somebody yelling get down or there's someone over there. These are pretty important things to hear and so the idea is that you want to be able to protect hearing but also preserve what they call situational awareness, like what's going on around you. Because about 50 percent of that comes from hearing, even somebody riding a bike down the street so a lot of it is you're aware of things by sound, even if you don't realize that.

So the military's challenge has been to come up with a way to protect hearing but also enable you to hear more quiet places. In special operations they have something that they're using, which is really cool. It's these ear cuffs that magically, not magically it's technology, but they attenuate loud noise, they minimize loud noises. They sense something that's over a certain decibel level, cut that but amplify quiet noises like a human voice. So you put these on and when they're switched on it's kind of amazing you're kind of like the Bionic Woman; you're able to hear a conversation across to the street. So that's the challenge of military hearing.

The other thing that's tough is that when a really loud noise starts happening there's no warning. So you could be going along for hours in a convoy and there's not any fire fight or anything going on, but suddenly an IED goes off so you don't have any warning to put on or in your ear protection. So that's the other challenge and it's hard to convince a soldier to wear a heavy headset the entire eight hours that they're driving somewhere. Somebody put it as the military doesn't have a noise problem, they have a quiet problem because a lot of time it's not loud but suddenly it's loud and you don't have the time and now your hearing is blown.

Like so many military technologies it's something that may start out with a specific military application but it finds its way to the civilian world. And I actually want a pair just to put on in the subway and ease drop to the other end of the car. When I was ...

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