Considerations on assessing the risk of work-related hearing loss

The large intersubject variability observed in demographic studies of noise-induced hearing loss illustrates how difficult it can be to estimate with precision the risk posed by exposure to noise. One possible source of the variability is the result of evaluating a diverse set of acoustic conditions with a simple metric A-weighted energy. In this paper the limitations of the energy-based criteria are reviewed. The benefits of evaluating a noise exposure in terms of energy and the metrics of frequency and time-domain kurtosis are discussed. A second source of variability in industrial noise studies may be related to non-acoustic factors such as chemical exposures that contribute to hearing loss acquired on the job