Commercial tools for individual assessment of hearing protection device performance.

To assess the attenuation of an hearing protector, stakeholders generally keep using data displayed on the protectors’ packaging. These data, reported by manufacturers, stem from tests conducted in the laboratory under ideal conditions. It is now universally accepted that these data are overestimated, which can induce a risk of hearing impairment for users. Consequently some HPD manufacturers have recently introduce commercial systems allowing individual assessment of hearing protector attenuation in the field. Four of these systems are tested here. Their evaluation consisted in comparing their results to reference measurements obtained using standardized methods for a group of test subjects. The trueness of the results is checked through average comparisons and their accuracy through individual values comparisons. Three of these systems provide satisfying results and can be used to validate employee hearing protections and to train them to achieve a good fitting of their hearing protectors.