I-Corps: Interactive noise canceling headphones for construction workers

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of modified hearing protection to reduce the adverse effects of noise pollution on workers on construction jobsites. More than one-half million construction employees are exposed to potentially hazardous noise levels annually. Overexposure to noise induces several potential physical and mental health risks for on-site employees. These potential risks include hearing impairment, stress, loss of attention, hypertension, enhanced blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease. Moreover, several studies have also found a loss of productivity for employees due to exposure to construction equipment noise. The prevalence of hearing protection device (HPD) use among U.S. construction workers is very poor. Some of users' most common complaints are that hearing protectors are uncomfortable, hot, and create difficulties in hearing and understanding speech communication and warning signals. Standard earphones do not adequately filter out ambient environmental noise. Users wearing standard earphones must raise the volume of the sound to overcome the environmental noise, which may cause further damage to their hearing. This I-Corps project is based on the development of hearing protection for construction workers that is designed to work with an interactive software application to give the user control of surrounding noise. This device recognizes all the sounds in the environment from a predefined library and labels them based on their type. This assignment may allow the user to filter out the background noises based on their needs using the application. The application is designed to produce a signal with a 180-shift delay to cancel the noises that the user selected to block. The interaction of these two noises is found to be destructive, causing the sound to be phased out. Using the application, people exposed to the job site noise may customize and choose which ambient sounds they want to hear and which ones they do not want to hear based on their needs. Therefore, they may opt out of the sound of a jackhammer while still being able to hear any warning signals. This sound selectivity may provide greater safety and hearing protection. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.