Functional hearing is critical for many tasks in the military and public safety where performance impacts could have life-threatening consequences. However, many of these occupations also involve frequent exposure to harmful noise. Ideally, our warfighters and public safety officers (PSOs) would have readily accessible Hearing Protection Devices (HPDs) that protect them from high-level noise exposures while preserving auditory situation awareness (SA). The unfortunate reality is that many HPDs degrade auditory SA, so our Service Members (SMs) and PSOs must often make a deliberate choice when engaging in hearing-critical life-threatening tasks between 1) wearing a hearing protector and sacrificing some SA or 2) operating without hearing protection and risking a temporary shift in hearing thresholds, both of which may impact their performance during the mission. The latter choice may also result in permanent hearing damage, which could impact fitness for duty or make them less effective in future operations. Yet, many still choose to operate without hearing protection.

Many forms of HPDs are available to mitigate the risk of both long- and short-term damage to the auditory system, and each have certain advantages and drawbacks in terms of their effect on functional hearing. Historically, this is assessed in laboratory settings at the individual level using highly controlled speech perception, sound detection, and localization experiments. In practice, SMs and PSOs rely on effective communication between individuals in environments with dynamic sources of auditory and visual input that compete for attention. 

Given the complexity and multifaceted nature of combat operations, few studies have evaluated the impact of hearing protection and hearing loss in these environments. In this presentation, we will review the relevant literature and highlight a series of completed and planned studies aimed at measuring the functional impact of hearing loss and various hearing protection conditions on SMs in field operations. The hope is that these studies will help to illustrate and quantify the importance of hearing in combat operations and provide valuable evidence to inform the selection of hearing protection for our Warfighters and PSOs.

Moderator: Kathy Gates

Presenter:

• Benjamin Sheffield holds dual degrees in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. After a four-year stint working in the defense industry, he got his start in auditory research as a volunteer in a hearing and speech lab while in graduate school at UC Irvine. He now has 16 years of experience working in auditory research, including the last 13 in a dual appointment with the Defense Centers for Public Health – Aberdeen and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. He has been the principal investigator on several studies examining the relationship between hearing acuity and operational performance and is a project lead on several public health surveillance projects leveraging boothless audiometry.
• Financial Disclosures: None
• Non-Financial Disclosures: None

Program Level: Intermediate

Learning Objectives: 

1. Describe forms of objective and subjective assessment for quantifying combat performance.
2. Discuss the potential drawbacks of forgoing use of HPDs while engaging in combat operations.
3. Describe different types of hearing protection and their impact on communication ability and operational performance.

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