Hearing Loss
I sat down and spoke with Mike Turcot, the Vice President of Manufacturing and R&D at Sonomax Hearing Healthcare Inc. to provide you information on how to prevent the #1 Claimed Occupational illness, hearing loss.
What causes it? How can we prevent it? I’m going to give you answers to these questions in this week’s Blog Q&A on “How To Prevent The #1 Occupational Illness.”
Shaun Hibbs ( Executive Distributors Industrial )
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the state of the industrial industry in context to hearing loss?
Mike Turcot
I think it’s safe to say until maybe 3o years ago nobody really cared about hearing protection. You just worked in a noisy environment and you just put up with it and you become deaf by the time that you retire, and that was just part of the game.
That then changed and they came in with these inserts or these foam plugs that you compressed and rolled between your fingers and shoved in your ear. Then that sort of became the industry norm.
What’s transpired…it’s become almost accepted fact that very few people actually wore the foam plugs the way they were designed…the muffs for a lot of environments are too heavy or too hot.
The end result is that you end up with a significant portion of workers who work in the noisy environment who end up with hearing loss by the time that they retire.
Shaun Hibbs
Do you think the conversation is changing in the industrial sector regarding preventing hearing loss?
Mike Turcot
It is starting because of the legislation. Primarily the noise induced hearing loss is now the highest workers claim in the US, for example.
Consequently, industries because of the benefit-cost analysis are looking and saying “we can’t continue to keep forking out hundreds of millions of dollars for worker’s compensation because they are blaming us.”
Shaun Hibbs
Why don’t you tell us about the product that you’ve developed that are being used in the industrial sector to prevent hearing loss for workers?
Mike Turcot
What we have developed is basically, sort of, what’s all wrapped up into something that we call Expansion Technology. Most people are unaware of just how diverse the air canal is. In fact, the ear canals are more personal then thumbprints.
Just as your thumbprint is unique to you your ear canal is also unique and there is no other ear canal on the planet that is like yours.
Trying to fit that diversity of canals with one-size fits all compressible ear piece is wishful thinking.
So we worked long and hard on the ear piece and the inflation technology itself and are currently on our seventh version of the ear piece. Sort of refining it every step of the way.
The other advantage of a custom fitted earpiece is that when you don’t put it in properly, it hurts.
It’s a self-feedback mechanism that tells you that you don’t have it in right.
In essence, we had to develop the injection silicon that inflates the bladder and we had to develop the ear piece.
Shaun Hibbs
What kind of industries are using the ear plugs?
Mike Turcot
One of the industries with the highest rate of worker related hearing loss is mining industry. Particularly deep shaft mining.
The noise that miners are exposed to is quite high because of the drilling or the jackhammer on the rock face or the detentions when you have your explosions that shatter the rock face.
Down in the mines, not only is the sound loud at the source, you’re also getting reverberation from all of these rock walls all over the place.
Consequently, by the time people retire there is 40% of them that have severe hearing loss.
Oil and Gas, Food Industry, in sense a certain type of industries is very noisy, specifically canning operations.
Impact source, metal stamping, automotive is certainly a prime candidate and road crews…
What are people in industry saying about using a custom molded ear plug to prevent hearing loss?
It takes some getting used to.
The biggest challenge seems to be this adoption or breaking in period.
The second one is, oddly enough the individual workers are not as sensitive, certainly as we would like, in regards to protecting their hearing. It’s not something that they generally believe is going to happen to them. Hearing loss is something that their grandparents suffered from.
Shaun Hibbs
Can you tell us a little more information on how we can order or connect with your product?
By all means, there is the www.eers.ca is our website for the company here in Montreal. There is also the Sonolab site, http://www.sonolab.com/.