Abstract
High-intensity noises are a health hazard for industrial workers, and hearing protection is necessary to prevent hearing loss. Passive methods, such as ear muffs, are ineffective against low-frequency noise. Moreover, many hearing-impaired workers must wear hearing aids to enable communication at their workplace, and such aids can amplify ambient noise. To overcome this problem, the present study developed a headset equipped with a digital signal processing system to implement adaptive-feedback active noise cancellation (AFANC) to reduce low-frequency noise. The proposed AFANC headset was effective against wideband industrial noise, with a maximum noise spectrum power reduction of 30 dB. Furthermore, when used with a hearing aid, it improved the speech signal-to-noise ratio by up to 14 dB. These results suggest that a headset with AFANC would be useful for hearing protection in workplaces with high levels of low-frequency industrial noise, especially for hearing-impaired workers.
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Lin, J.H., Li, P.C., Tang, S.T. et al. Industrial wideband noise reduction for hearing aids using a headset with adaptive-feedback active noise cancellation. Med. Biol. Eng. Comput. 43, 739–745 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02430951
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02430951