Abstract
Previous research has shown that auditory occlusion effects could inhibit people from using hearing protection devices or hearing aids, which raises safety and usability concerns. The objective of this study was to evaluate occlusion effects as a function of insertion depth (shallow and deep), earplug type (foam earplug and medical balloonbased earplug), and excitation source (bone vibrator and self vocal utterance). Ten participants, six male and four female, completed the experiment. The ANOVA and post hoc tests conducted on the measured occlusion effects revealed main effects of insertion depth and earplug type, as well as an interaction effect between insertion depth and earplug type. The occlusion effect of deeply inserted earplugs was smaller than that of shallowly inserted earplugs by 11.2 dB. At deep insertion, the balloon-based earplugs produced an occlusion effect of 14.9 dB while the foam earplugs produced 5.9 dB.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.