Industrial workers are exposed to noise levels that could damage their hearing. The FieldMIRE (FMIRE) method has been developed to quantify earplug and earmuff attenuations with two microphones located under and outside of the HPD. This technique has been designed to be used in the field, but doesn't give a direct access to the noise exposure level, that is, the noise level at the head location...

INTRODUCTION Patients in intensive care units (ICUs) suffer from sleep deprivation arising from nursing interventions and ambient noise. This may exacerbate confusion and ICU-related delirium. The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests that average hospital sound levels should not exceed 35 dB with a maximum of 40 dB overnight. We monitored five ICUs to check compliance with these guidelines....

Background 270 million workplace accidents occur annually. In Uganda, Kampala district has the highest workplace injury and fatality rates. However, information on personal protective equipment (PPE)-hand gloves, hardhats, overalls, safety boots, earplugs, safety harness with lanyard, and face shields-utilization among building construction workers remains scarce. We assessed PPE utilization an...

Hearing protection devices (HPDs) such as earplugs offer to mitigate noise exposure and reduce the incidence of hearing loss among persons frequently exposed to intense sound. However, distortions of spatial acoustic information and reduced audibility of low-intensity sounds caused by many existing HPDs can make their use untenable in high-risk (e.g., military or law enforcement) environments w...

Individual hearing protection is a short term solution frequently used to protect workers against noise exposure. This work is part of a larger research program on the evaluation of real world attenuation of hearing protection devices (HPD) such as earplugs and earmuffs. Its objective is to develop a Finite Element (FE) model to predict both the airborne and structure borne sound transmission t...

BACKGROUND The use of music to relieve anxiety has been examined in various studies, but the results are inconclusive. METHODS From April to October 2015, 160 patients undergoing examination of pulmonary nodules were randomly assigned to MusiCure or no music. MusiCure was administered through earplugs to ensure blinding of the staff and was played from admission to the operating theatre to th...

Earplugs are a widespread solution to prevent the problem of hearing loss in the workplace environment, but they do not always perform as desired. Using a model of the ear canal occluded by an earplug could be helpful to perform sensitivity analyses (geometry and materials of the earplug) and to better understand the role of the earplug. The human external ear is a complex system made up of dif...

Most studies of heterozygosity-fitness correlations (HFCs) in natural populations relate to fitness traits expressed early in life, whereas traits that are often more difficult to measure such as longevity and adult body size remain elusive. Teeth provide a window on an individual's life history, allowing the reliable estimation of both age and body size. Consequently, we collected paired upper...

Background: Sleep quality in hospitalized medicine patients is poor, with environmental factors among the most frequently cited reasons. Objective: We tested the efficacy of a non-pharmacologic intervention on the sleep quality of medicine inpatients. Design/Methods: A controlled study to evaluate our non-pharmacologic multidisciplinary 'TUCK-in' protocol (which includes timed lights-off period...

OBJECTIVE Many adolescents and young adults consciously expose themselves to loud music for entertainment. We hypothesized that these individuals might not be aware that exposure to loud music could result in hearing loss. Furthermore, we wished to assess the feasibility of a web-based survey to collect health information from this group. METHODS A 28-question survey was designed to target ad...