Speech intelligibility while wearing full-facepiece air-purifying respirators

Intelligible speech communication while wearing air-purifying respirators is critical for law enforcement officers, particularly when they are communicating with each other or the public. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) requires a 70% overall performance rating to pass speech intelligibility certification for commercial chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear air-purifying respirators. However, the speech intelligibility of certified respirators is not reported and the impact on operational performance is unknown. The objective of this effort was to assess the speech intelligibility of 12 certified air-purifying respirators and to predict their impact on operational performance. The NIOSH respirator certification standard testing procedures were followed. Regression equations were fit to data from studies that examined the impact of degraded speech intelligibility on operational performance of simple and complex missions. The impact of the tested respirators on operational performance was estimated from these equations. Performance ratings observed for each respirator were: MSA Millennium (90%), 3M FR-M40 (88%), MSA Ultra Elite (87%), Scott M110 (86%), North 5400 (85%), Scott M120 (85%), Avon C50 (84%), Avon FM12 (84%), Survivair Optifit (81%), Drager CDR 4500 (81%), Peltor-AOSafety M-TAC (79%), and 3M FR-7800B (78%). The Millennium and FR-M40 had statistically significantly higher scores than the FR-7800B. The Millennium also scored significantly higher than the M-TAC. All of the tested respirators were predicted to have little impact on simple and complex mission performance times and on simple mission success rate. However, the regression equations showed that 75% of missions that require complex communications would be completed while wearing the Millennium, FR-M40, or Ultra Elite but that only 60% would be completed successfully while wearing the FR-7800B. These results suggest that some certified respirators may have a greater impact on speech communications than others.